Are you scratching your head over what to buy the conservative gentleman in your life? Please avoid the “hideous tie so kindly meant,” the slippers, the pipe or another sweater. Choose gifts that are quality even if they are not costly. Choose consumables or treasures that will add value for Christmas and the rest of [...]
“What can man do against such reckless hate?” asks the trapped and helpless Theoden King in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers. He speaks for us all when faced with the orcs of ISIS rising in the East. Another film struggles with the same question. In Of Gods and Men nine Trappist monks face the encroaching [...]
In The Heart of Darkness Conrad’s madman Kurtz whispers his last words, “The horror. The horror.” The novella is aptly named for it takes the reader into the heart of darkness and is thus a forerunner of the horror genre in literature and film. The horror genre answers the question, “How can literature and film [...]
St. Benedict is rightly named the patron of Europe and the father of Western civilization. As we turn to him to learn how to live together, we draw deep from the wells of Western wisdom, and our businesses and our lives will be nurtured and grow not only prosperous but peaceful. It seems a far [...]
One of the most remarkable characters of the English Revolution of the sixteenth century is Elizabeth Barton. An illiterate mystic who challenged Henry VIII to his face, and was eventually martyred for her stance, Barton influenced the course of history as a small boulder affects the flow of a mighty river. Elizabeth Barton was born [...]
On a trip to Oklahoma I arrived at the airport and was taken to a suburban retail area for a meal. Suddenly it occurred to me that I could very well have been back in any part of the United States. Wherever I go in the USA I find the same retail developments with the [...]
“Give your hero family problems!” demanded my screenwriting tutor. “For the film to have depth and meaning, the outward storyline needs to reflect the hero’s inward journey to grow up, overcome his faults, find true love and lasting happiness. The hero must suffer from an inner wound,” he continued, “and his quest to find healing [...]
I became infected with this most deadly disease when I was ten years old. The 1966 World Book Encyclopedia Yearbook arrived, and working my way through it I came across the obituary of T.S. Eliot. There he was in his “five piece suit” gazing at the camera in that lugubriously quizzical way he had. I [...]
Maybe it is the Amish in me, but I have never been good at wasting time. First thing in the morning it seems my mind is alert, and I’m thinking of the next problem to be solved, the next essay to be written, then the next meeting to attend, and the day’s work to be [...]
When I was a young Anglican priest in England, it was part of my daily routine to walk the half-mile across town for Evening Prayer in the parish church. My path took me past a neighbor whom I knew to be a Jehovah’s Witness. This particular JW was the sort of man who woke up [...]
Ralph Napierski (2nd on r) posed as a bishop at the Vatican Mother church is often more like a grandma, and one of my pastimes is rummaging around in her attic. I enjoy investigating religious oddities and curiosities. I’ll pay the admission price to see the ecclesiastical equivalent of Ripley’s Believe it or [...]
O.E. Parker is constantly looking in the mirror. Vanity of vanities. Parker is one of Flannery O’Connor’s crazy misfits. A tough dropout who was captivated by the mystique of tattoo at the age of fourteen when he saw the tattooed man at the county fair. Having a tattoo made the poor idiot feel special, so [...]
Often on my day off, before a morning motorcycle ride in the mountains, I treat myself to breakfast at a Southern American institution: Waffle House. Waffle Houses are not luxurious. The box-like buildings are designed for cheerful efficiency, and cheerfully efficient they are. As soon as you walk through the door the staff call out [...]
Once upon a time a professor of philology, (that is to say, a lover of language), was daydreaming in his university rooms when he scribbled on the back of an anonymous exam paper, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…” Thus was begun a true story—one of the greatest of the true [...]