Most “Christian” music is taken from the secular world. People might have nice feelings about Jesus by listening to it, but the secular music was designed to produce certain types of feelings, and why should those warm sentimental feelings or hard emotional feelings be linked with worship? A friend of mine used to quip, “When [...]
Consumption of content is increasingly through audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube videos—in other words, through oral tradition. We may thus be witnessing a technological revolution that not only takes us forward into a brave new world of communication, but also backward to the time of the Old Testament patriarchs. A few years ago I was able [...]
Fr. Michael Ward believes that each of the seven chronicles of Narnia can be seen to echo the seven planets of medieval cosmology in their themes, characters, and mood. In The Narnia Code, Father Michael Ward has abridged and made more accessible Planet Narnia, his doctoral thesis on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia [...]
The modern, brutalist church architects were really driven not by a desire for authenticity, but by a modernist, iconoclastic ideology. The old world with its fancy churches, lacy vestments, precious art, and Mozartian masses was out. This was a modern world of factories, public housing—a world of steel and concrete, concrete and steel. Notre-Dame [...]
Perhaps the Mount Sinai of the Bible is not the traditional site located in Egypt, but another mountain in modern Saudi Arabia, whose volcanic nature would help explain the miracles described in Exodus. Last month it was reported that the ancient monastery of St Catherine at Mt Sinai is to be nationalized by the Egyptian [...]
William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” presents a dark vision that captures the mood of our age, when all seems to be disintegrating into chaos. His prophetic foresight is even more remarkable in that he sees the Sphinx-like beast rising from the deserts of the East. While the world spins forward in what seems [...]
The Ascension was a unique event because it was a first in human history. When Jesus was “taken up into heaven,” what really happened was that the door swung open for physical humanity to be divinized. By this action the physical was actually brought into heaven and a physical dimension was introduced to the spiritual [...]
Must Artificial Intelligence open the door to "that hideous strength" described by C.S Lewis? Time will tell, though I suspect the answer to the juggernaut that is Artificial Intelligence may well be the Babel scenario. In recent online postings, writer Rod Dreher has been commenting on various predictions of an apocalypse caused by Artificial Intelligence. [...]
Joel Coen’s "The Tragedy of Macbeth" reminds us at a visceral level that the supernatural and the natural worlds are interwoven in a matrix of good and evil. When Macbeth dabbles in the occult, he lets loose the lords of darkness. A stark, new cinematic take on Macbeth is Joel Coen’s 2021 adaptation The Tragedy [...]
The vast majority of human beings of all races and in every place and at every time have understood that there is such a thing as the miraculous, that strange things do happen, and that our materialist explanations do not explain everything. Some time ago a friend of mine told me a miracle story. He [...]
Too often we Christians have given in to the temptation to sanitize the crucifixion and sentimentalize the resurrection. But the resurrection was not, at first, a cause for rejoicing, but the source of fear—soul-shaking, knee-knocking, heart-pounding, earth-quaking fear. One of the good things about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is the gore. He [...]
E.E. Cummings’ attitude to dogma and formal religion may have remained skeptical, but true to his Unitarian roots, he retained respect for spirituality and a simple reverence towards the Almighty. Echoing the transcendentalism of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, Cummings bursts forth with simple, lyrical praise for God and nature. What shall we make of Edward [...]
The Christian who is furthest along the journey repeats a constant prayer which is simply, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me a Sinner.” He has developed a metanoia mentality. He is constantly turning around; constantly checking his instinct to be right and acknowledging that he is wrong. Isn’t it curious how [...]
Can saints fly? Perhaps levitation is a gift to humanity to puncture our pride—to remind us that we don’t have all the answers, and that our approach to all the things we take with such gravity ought to be spiced with a touch of levity. Pope Benedict XVI wrote somewhere that “Scripture can only be [...]