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 one [...]
Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko preached faith and freedom to the people of Poland. The communists hated him, and someone ordered his murder. But we have this enduring commandment from Fr. Jerzy: “Defeat evil with goodness!” It remains valid even as communism has morphed into post-communism in the former Soviet zone, and reemerged as radical secular and [...]
Relationship is integral to any story, and more so as the environment itself interacts with a clearly human personality. Willa Cather’s land can reflect the many paradoxes within us to show us more of ourselves, all the greater reason to see her settings as characters of value, power, and influence. In the world of story, [...]
Given that human beings’ aspirations are framed by limitations, there will always be a dynamic tension between God and man, faith and reason, the absolute and relative, the universal and the particular, unity and diversity, Jerusalem and Athens, liberty and order. Though the work is never finished, historian Stephen J. Tonsor III entered into this [...]
T.S. Eliot reaches into the unsaid, perhaps even into the ultimately unsayable, in a way that makes new possibilities present for those of his own time. Eliot comes out of the great tradition, the long conversation of the West, which is now your own earned inheritance as well. What will you do with it? Early [...]
The good mentor is virtually inseparable from the phenomenon of initiation that has always been understood as a crucial part of the rite of passage between one condition in life to another, a new and deeper community. In an age where mentors and rites of passage are being neglected, we should not forget the fundamental [...]
Victor Davis Hanson is surely convinced that the Trump presidency has been, by and large, a good and necessary thing for America. But whether or not a Trump presidency will turn out to be a good thing for one Donald J. Trump is another matter entirely. The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (400 [...]
As a wine professional and classically trained musician, I’ve always wanted to know if wine was important in the lives of the great composers. Did Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven enjoy wine daily? Did they keep a cellar? Did they write about the wines they drank? I’ve never been able to find much about the subject [...]
Against the suffocating world of Nazism, communism, Holocaust camps, and gulags, imagination found a new life in the 1940s and 1950s, as artists strove for a renewal of beauty, goodness, and truth. It is only in this context that one can understand the rise of the “superhero,” among whom none have endured as well as [...]
In Tim Powers’ supernatural thriller, Last Call, which is set largely in Las Vegas, the city and its casinos are seen as the playground of invisible demonic forces who prey on those who are playing the tables. For those who see reality in supernatural terms, this is the way things are in Vegas, a city [...]
James Como’s C.S Lewis: A Very Short Introduction is delightful and is the single finest biographical survey yet written on the Oxford don. In a little more than one hundred pages, you’ll happily come to know the complexities of the most famous convert to Christianity in the twentieth century. C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, by [...]
We should not confuse or conflate Russian President Vladimir Putin with Soviet leaders, such as Josef Stalin. They are as different as the proverbial chalk and cheese. Nowhere is this more evident than the way in which Mr. Putin has shown himself to be a great admirer of the anti-Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Special [...]
Dr. Louis Markos explains how the problem in today's education is not that virtue is forgotten, but that only certain "pseudo-virtues" are being taught. We're raising a generation of people who say, "Well, yeah, I do sleep around. But I recycle cans and so it's okay." We've thrown out the sins against morality and replaced [...]
Mrs. Maisel must decide, like all other men and women who follow a path that separates them from their family, home, gods, and city, whether the allure of a life in the spotlight and the total freedom it promises is preferable to, or reconcilable with, the many good things she risks turning away from… The [...]