My name is Jeff Reimer.
I write about literature, art, faith, and culture.
Essays & Reviews
2024
Seeing the Sistine Chapel (Commonweal). A review of All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel by Jeannie Marshall.
2023
Bascombe in Winter (Fare Forward). A review of Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford.
How Not to Be a Schismatic (Comment). In which I admit to being ecclesially confused.
A Great Historian’s Inner History (The Bulwark). A review of Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown.
Rules for Passivists (Comment). Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about change. In which case I have some advice.
The World Through a Copyeditor’s Eyes (The Bulwark). I made my living as a copyeditor for twelve years. As a copyeditor you’re paid to not have thoughts. But I had thoughts anyway.
2022
Thick Culture: Tradition, Identity, and Meaning at a Family Reunion (Comment). I grew up adjacent to but not directly within the culture of my rural, close-knit extended family, then moved away, and then moved back. Existential complications ensue.
Scene Sovereignty (Comment). Anne Snyder had Matt Crummy and me on Comment‘s podcast, The Whole Person Revolution, to talk about the themes in this essay.
Single Premium Life: Vice, Virtue, and Grace in Groundhog Day (Comment). Something for you to read on February 2.
Images of the Invisible God (Commonweal). In which I think out loud about what it means to (not) look at God.
2021
Giving the Sickness a Name: Walker Percy and Acedia (Commonweal). I was reading Walker Percy and a book about acedia at the same time and noticed … some overlap.
The Lost Pilgrims: Walker Percy, Richard Ford, and the Substance of Hope (Fare Forward). Two novelists deal with the things their characters don’t notice in different but telling ways.
On Not Burying the Dead (Plough). My wife got cancer. I got acedia.
The Blood of Our Attention (Comment). A review of Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs.
2020
What Comes After: W. H. Auden’s Cure for the Post-Christmas Blues (Commonweal). I was a guest on For the Life of the World, the podcast hosted by the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, talking about this essay and Auden’s long poem For the Time Being.
Going Viral (Comment). I went viral on Twitter. It was weird.
Good Birth, Good Death (Comment). My thirty-ninth birthday got me thinking about death, the creation of the world, the Annunciation, Christ’s crucifixion, and four authors who all died when they were thirty-nine.
Editing as Asceticism (Comment). In which I declare my preference for short books unless it’s the Summa theologiae.
Cultivating Friendship (Comment). Friends are good actually.
Poetry
My poem “Holy Saturday” was published in the anthology Clearing Paths, from Darkly Bright Press.
About
I am an editor for Comment magazine.
I also sometimes copyedit and proofread books.
Contact
For writing queries email jreimer@gmail.com.
For Comment queries email jreimer@cardus.ca.
Follow me on Twitter. Friend me on Facebook.
JR 