What does the European Union have in common with Hotel California? The answer is that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Take, for instance, the ongoing Brexit saga. Over and again, in one democratic vote after another, the British people have made it abundantly clear that they [...]
I’ve just completed the sixteen-hour marathon, run over three consecutive Tuesday evenings at a friend’s house, watching all three extended editions of Peter Jackson’s movie magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings. I’ve already shared my impressions of watching The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers for the first time in possibly [...]
What makes Gilbert Keith Chesterton so wonderful is that he is full of wonder. He doesn’t merely see trees, or clouds or sky; he sees glorious creatures charged with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the grandeur of God. He sees that seeing is itself a miracle. “Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,” he [...]
As I pondered the artistic license that Peter Jackson had granted himself in one of the most important scenes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring, I realized that a film adaptation of a literary work should not be expected to follow the literal letter of the original but should seek faithfully to [...]
Modernity seems intent on forgetting the past or burying it. This being so, it might prove helpful to take a look at Homer’s Odysseus. What on earth has a fictional character, or, at any rate, a legendary character, to do with us? Surprisingly, he has a great deal to teach us, because he is [...]
I’ve just enjoyed the second of the three movie nights at a friend’s house watching the full extended editions of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. As I stated in my essay describing my experience of watching The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time in many years, it’s intriguing to see [...]
Archaisms renew the language; they are the means by which language is renovated and restored to its original splendor. It is the old things that make all things new. The “coming peril” was not Bolshevism, G.K. Chesterton said in 1927, only ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was “standardization by a low standard.” For [...]
I have read many of the volumes in my home, but there are many more I have yet to read and many which will remain unread when the soft sift in my hour glass is finally spent. And there are eighteen others I have not yet had time to write. Our home is awash [...]
The great fruit of C.S. Lewis’s clarity is that he shows his readers that the great truths are knowable through the application of pure and simple common sense. He makes the truth seem so obvious and so inescapable that we feel that we must always have known it, at least subconsciously. Some time ago, [...]
When I was forty years old, I left my native land to begin a new life with my new wife in the New World. Although I was escaping neither poverty nor persecution, I realized that I was now an immigrant. I could look at life and immigration from both sides now. Life is full [...]
A satirical spoof on the pretentiousness of modern art, “Batman” episodes “Pop Goes the Joker” and “Flop Goes the Joker” are side-splittingly out-loud funny while being simultaneously the best exposé of the naked nonsense beneath the Emperor’s new clothes. The secret’s out. My dual identity has been discovered. By day, I spend my time [...]
A school offering a good and true education will answer the question “What is truth?” in the words that Christ gave to His disciples when He told them that He is “the way, the truth, and the life.” An education that sidelines Christ or ignores Him, or which treats Christianity as only one of [...]
Jane Austen is more than a giantess among women writers. She is also a giantess among the giants, holding a place of pride and prominence among the greatest writers of either sex and of all ages. She doesn’t merely tower above George Elliot, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and the Brontë sisters, she also towers above [...]
The more that Christ is present in the soul of a culture or society, the more will such a society or culture truly reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty of His image. We can see the very pattern of history as a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven, of varying threads which are good, bad, or [...]