In case you wondered …

… on Who Wants To be A Jewish Writer? and Other Essays by Adam Kirsch – On the Seawall. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Taken as a whole, these essays reveal Kirsch’s focus on a Jewish approach to the world that is pragmatic, emphasizing the quotidian life lived here on earth now, and characterized by a special relationship to texts that originates in Talmud study. He contrasts this mode with a Christian outlook in which, while “[c]ontemporary poetry is not often religious, but … is still intensely, covertly metaphysical … The poet is for the modern world what the prophet and the philosopher were in ancient times: the person who sees into the essence of things, who knows what the world really is and how it should be.”