Solzhenitsyn: A Centenary Celebration

By |2021-08-02T14:13:47-05:00December 11th, 2018|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Character, Christianity, Heroism, History, Hope, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, StAR|

The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Some of these were both heroes and giants, and one must include in this number the giant and heroic figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Yet many of the giants were not heroes, and many of the heroes were [...]

Incarnation and the Moving Image: Towards a Christian Philosophy of Film

By |2019-09-28T09:49:55-05:00December 8th, 2018|Categories: Christianity, Film, StAR|

In the iconoclasm controversy of the eighth century, the church debated the possibility of images in worship. The Eastern Church, challenged by the rise of Islam, with its total prohibition of religious imagery, worried that Christian imagery broke the commandment forbidding the making of graven images. The iconoclasts also argued that the only true presentation [...]

Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps”: A Coded Message?

By |2023-08-12T18:12:16-05:00October 4th, 2018|Categories: Film, History, Mystery, StAR, World War II|

The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight... The Thirty-Nine Steps. A novel. Then a film: The 39 Steps. In the end, that [...]

Mel Gibson, “Hacksaw Ridge,” & the Real Hollywood Counter-Culture

By |2019-09-28T09:50:01-05:00August 30th, 2018|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Film, StAR|

In Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson continues to present an alternative world-view to filmgoers. It is one at odds with almost all that emanates from Hollywood, but, nevertheless, is one that finds a welcome reception in the real world, where family and marriage, patriotism and courage, faith and self-sacrifice still form part of the daily lives [...]

The Wages of Sin: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Doomed Universe

By |2019-09-28T09:50:03-05:00July 25th, 2018|Categories: Death, Film, StAR|

In Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos, it is as if there is an existential darkness present throughout. In this world, no matter how cunning the schemes or how fail-safe the get-away plans are, for all concerned there is a retribution coming. In Melville’s cinematic universe the wages of sin are always death… Recently, at London’s British Film Institute, [...]

“Grizzly Man”: Longing for Eden

By |2019-09-28T09:50:05-05:00June 28th, 2018|Categories: Civil Society, Culture, Film, Joseph Pearce, StAR|

The human and animal worlds are distinct, and relations between them are as much affected by Original Sin as all else in the universe. No amount of wishful thinking, no matter how well-intentioned or deluded, is going to change this… In the last decades there has been a romanticization of nature and man’s place within [...]

Movies, Myth, and History

By |2023-10-08T20:02:50-05:00April 21st, 2018|Categories: Books, Christianity, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Film, Gospel Reflection, History, Myth, StAR|

What shall we make of filmmakers who twist history for propaganda purposes? In an extreme way, they are doing what all historians do: They are not only recording history, they are also interpreting it—and can history be done without interpreting the facts?… Some time ago I watched a fascinating documentary on the assassination of President [...]

Richard Wagner, the Nazis, and Christianity

By |2021-02-12T15:17:25-06:00October 12th, 2017|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Joseph Pearce, Music, Richard Wagner, StAR|

Richard Wagner’s legacy has been overshadowed, and some would say permanently marred, by the manner in which he became the poster child of Hitler’s grotesque Third Reich. Yet should we condemn his music for this reason? Nice to see your music selections. But Wagner, your favorite composer! Say it ain’t so, Joe! The above-quoted words [...]

The World’s a Stage: The Drama of Faith

By |2019-09-28T09:50:14-05:00September 15th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Great Books, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, StAR, Theater, William Shakespeare|

Shakespeare shows us that there are none so blind as those who will not see because they prefer the darkness of sin to the light of virtue… All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many [...]

The Shakespeare Scholar Who Crossed Swords with C.S. Lewis

By |2021-05-03T15:44:39-05:00August 30th, 2017|Categories: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Pearce, Literature, StAR|

The Shakespeare scholar who crossed swords with C.S. Lewis describes Lewis in the early 1950s, at the height of his fame, as “a red-faced, egg-headed, portly, jolly, middle-aged man, who was (like Old King Cole) fond of his pipe and his glass of beer.” Father Peter Milward Father Peter Milward SJ, who died [...]

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