Q: There was an online article “The Religion of Whatever,” pointing out that religion is “whatever” we make it. What is the difference between “professing Christ” and “possessing Christ”? — A.C. A: ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s history of American English ...

John Guillory’s “Cultural Capital,” published amid the 1990s canon wars, became a classic. In a follow-up, “Professing Criticism,” he takes on his field’s deep funk. By Jennifer Schuessler Thirty ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...

The scene: a graduate seminar in literature sometime in the eerily becalmed days of the mid-1990s, when for an aspirant to an academic job, the future seemed poised to break in one of two ...