Algis Valiunas

Fellow

Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.

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Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.

A literary essayist, his writings have appeared in Commentary, the Weekly StandardNational ReviewFirst Things, the American Spectator, the New Criterion, and the Claremont Review of Books. They have also appeared in various collections, including most recently The Best Spiritual Writing, 2013 (Penguin, 2012). He is also the author of the book Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study (Encounter, 2002). He holds degrees from Dartmouth College; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the University of Chicago, where Saul Bellow was his doctoral dissertation adviser in the Committee on Social Thought.

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James Joyce and the Modernist Ambition

Algis Valiunas

Celebrated novelists, like Olympic athletes or Hollywood starlets, come and go.

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / March 1, 2024

Wounded Healers

Algis Valiunas

In a new book, an eminent psychologist with an “unquiet mind” explores why it often takes one to treat another.

The New Atlantis / October 1, 2023

The Greatest Catholic Opera

Algis Valiunas

Opera has traditionally had little interest in Christian orthodoxy. So when composer Francis Poulenc wrote his masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites, the work’s celebration of heroic piety defied the secular spirit of the art form.

Articles

First Things / July 14, 2023

Out of The Waste Land

Algis Valiunas

T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece.

Claremont Review of Books / July 1, 2023

What Émile Zola’s Nana Can Teach Our Liberated Age

Algis Valiunas

Seen from our enlightened vantage, Nana might well seem the original torchbearer of all the brave new freedoms. In the end, however, uncharitable Nature undoes her.

Articles

First Things / June 13, 2023

Why Were They Dropped?

Algis Valiunas

The revisionist historians who cast doubt on why Truman made his fateful decision

Articles

The New Atlantis / May 1, 2023

Nature versus Culture

Algis Valiunas

In America today, a moral chasm exists between those whose bodies and souls yearn for nature in the wild and those who need citified surroundings to feel fully alive.

Articles

National Affairs / April 12, 2023

My Madness

Algis Valiunas

To suffer schizophrenia is to be born again, into a reality stranger and more excruciating than anything you could imagine while sane.

Articles

First Things / January 1, 2023

The Life and Times of Chateaubriand

Algis Valiunas

“Nature has accorded Chateaubriand a sacred fire; his works attest to it. His style is not that of Racine, it is that of the prophet.”

Articles

National Review / December 1, 2022

Taking Aristophanes Seriously

Algis Valiunas

The original gross-out comic.

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / October 12, 2022

Robert Lowell’s Fruitful Agony

Algis Valiunas

The suffering and the artistic gift were of a piece for Lowell, and he bore the suffering manfully for the sake of the poetic grace he was vouchsafed.

Articles

National Review / August 2, 2022

Sickness of the Mind, Triumph of the Soul

Algis Valiunas

Dostoevsky’s prescient diagnoses of the Russian and the human condition have more to teach us now than ever.

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / July 21, 2022