“I know what I like, and I don’t like that!” is the usual response by hoi polloi when faced with modern art. When the modern art is in church the response is even more visceral and vicious: “It’s horrible! It’s disgusting! It’s a blasphemy!” There are few more obscene contradictions in our modern world than [...]
Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which [...]
I have become increasingly cynical about my fellow Americans’ praise of freedom. “Freedom,” it seems to me, has become a meaningless jingoistic slogan that is used to excuse most anything. “Our boys died defending our freedom!” they cry as yet another flag-draped coffin is unloaded from the plane. Did that boy die defending our freedom? [...]
The roaring success of the English television drama Downton Abbey had little to do with the grand house, the sumptuous costumes, the superb cast and intricately intriguing storyline. Having just finished watching the final season, it occurred to me that the series’s success has everything to do with fairytales. […]
I have recently had the mixed blessing of Regnery offering to publish my book, The Mystery of the Magi: The True Identity of the Three Wise Men. I say mixed blessing because it means I have had to face that serious hard work called research. Usually content to tap out inspirational, short essays for online [...]
In Toy Story 3, the boy Andy is ready to go off to college. His room is being tidied, and his toys are about to be boxed up and stored in the attic. Then Mom makes a mistake and Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang are packed off to a kiddie daycare center called [...]
In a noble enterprise, the people of my small Catholic parish in the poor part of town are trying to build a beautiful church. The church itself echoes the simple dignity of early Italian Romanesque, monastic architecture. From a closed church in Massachusetts, we have salvaged a complete set of forty-seven stained-glass windows, plus a [...]
As our own society seems plunged into ever darker decadence and despair, the beauty, truth and goodness of Tolkien’s classic is an astringent balm. It is the bright clear air of a spring morning in the midst of the contemporary atmosphere of the Dead Marshes. For Christmas last year, friends bought me the super-duper, fiftieth-anniversary, [...]
The first three of the Four Quartets provide deep connections between significant geography and significant biography for T.S. Eliot. In Burnt Norton, the site of a ruined manor house became the locus for a meditation on what might have been. His visit there with an old college flame, Emily Hale, prompted a poem of nostalgia and [...]
In the midst of the tumultuous trials of the modern age, and in a world as dangerous and unpredictable as the sea, T.S. Eliot offers in “Dry Salvages” a path of peace, and a road to redemption. As the Second World War raged around him, T.S. Eliot composed the third of his Four Quartets. Conscious [...]
In 1939, four years after the publication of Burnt Norton, T.S.Eliot worried that he would write no more poetry. Increasingly interested and involved in the production of his verse drama, he attempted another poem using fragments of Burnt Norton and written in the same style. […]
T.S.Eliot argued that the biographical details of the poet were irrelevant to the understanding of the poetry, and yet his own poetry is so deeply personal that it often remains obtuse until illuminated by an understanding of his personal life. Eliot’s masterpiece—The Four Quartets—are the perfect example, and Burnt Norton—the first of the four—reveals its [...]
I was an Anglican curate when I saw the sun spin. It happened like this. One of the teenagers in the parish had been to Medjugorje and suddenly got keen on the Blessed Virgin Mary. He joined a Medjugorje prayer group and twisted my arm to go with them on a visit to the Bosnian [...]
When we lived in England I started and ran a business training/personal development company. We did work in prisons and schools as well as in management training. As part of the training we would often talk about belief systems, and I would state that everyone believed in something. One prisoner insisted, “Not me. I don’t [...]