Sister Mary Lucy was a blind hermit, and being comfortable in the border lands between this world and the next, she was always intriguing to visit. One day she asked me if I thought the end of the world was nigh. “I grew up in a fundamentalist church.” I explained, “where we heard terrible prophecies [...]
When Pope Benedict warned about “the Dictatorship of Relativism,” he meant it. Literally. This was hammered home not long ago when I was speaking to a group of students about the issue of same sex marriage. I prefaced the discussion with a description of relativism saying that this non-philosophy was now the mainstream, default setting [...]
I confess to feeling a little surge of excitement this week in watching the trailer for the new Star Wars film. I thought the Narnia movies were pretty good, I greatly enjoy Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I do not complain too much when my sons drag me off to yet another [...]
When my nephew Michael was getting ready for college he told me he was expected to write a paper in his first week entitled, “How do I know I exist?”After discussing the matter for some time he concluded that the best thing to do was to punch his professor in the nose. The resulting pain [...]
In re-reading T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday on Ash Wednesday, a friend asks what many have wondered: “Excuse me, but what on earth does ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’ mean?” Is it such a mystery? With a little bit of detective work we can see through the illusion, connect the allusion, pick up [...]
I was intrigued to learn that the weird poet Edith Sitwell was friends with the wild sexpot Marilyn Monroe. The juxtaposition of the aristocratic Englishwoman with the Hollywood starlet makes one wonder about the two women and the lessons we might learn from their famous and fragile lives. Having known for some time of the [...]
Off I went to study at Oxford filled with the love of England and English literature only to find that the English had little love of their own most popular exports. I expected Oxford to be full of the cult of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as Hannibal, Missouri brags about being the home of [...]
T.S. Eliot and his second wife, Valerie The struggles of T.S. Eliot’s personal life continue to fascinate both his critics and admirers. Eliot was frustrated and wounded in love, and the women in his life thus assume mythical proportions, as if his life and literature have become a unified drama. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood [...]
Two quirks haunt human nature. They are connected in a sick symbiosis, feeding off each other like the proverbial snakes gorging in mutual cannibalism. One quirk is the desire for paradise. The second is the demands of paranoia. One is a sweet sickness and the other sour. The desire for paradise seems to be humanity’s [...]
Two profound meditations on the end of time sprang from the desolate decade of the 1940s giving an austere hope in the midst of the dark. T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets, begun in 1937, were finally published in 1943. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was composed in 1940 in the most extraordinary circumstances while [...]
In the dark days of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis published one of his most enduring and endearing books. The Screwtape Letters is a collection of epistles from a senior devil to his junior colleague, outlining how he should handle his “patient.” Lewis wrote the book as a series of articles for The Guardian newspaper [...]
While many other bastards brooded over their less than illustrious beginnings, Alec Guinness, by some wondrous mixture of talent and grace, turned that same open wound into the unique sign of his genius, thus becoming a glorious bastard. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing the illegitimate Don John plots to spoil the happiness and prosperity [...]
As an English snob once said, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” What is remarkable about the history of the Jewish people is that it is unremarkable. It is extraordinary because it is ordinary. In other words, the Hebrews did not build ziggurats and hanging gardens. They did not carve a mysterious and [...]
One of the most popular and enduring films, and fast on its way to becoming a timeless classic, features murder, nudity, adultery, savage violence, homosexual rape, and suicide. The movie is Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption. Based on a novella by Stephen King, the film recounts the story of uptight banker Andy Dufresne, who is locked [...]