Valkyrie is a 2008 thriller film directed and co-produced by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander. The film is set in Nazi Germany during World War II and depicts the 20 July plot in 1944 by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and to use the Operation Valkyrie national emergency [...]
Michael Haydn's Requiem—like the composer himself—has receded into the historical mists. But this astounding work heavily influenced Mozart's own Requiem and is worthy of comparison with every other setting of the Mass for the Dead ever composed. Michael Haydn The 1984 film Amadeus brought to the general public's attention that many minor composers [...]
Conservatives must preserve and pass on the riches of the past, but we must also be aware of and open to the opportunities of the present, so that the proper fusion of old and new will inspire and enable truly great art. From time to time I publish on Twitter my view of the social [...]
Indifferentism in religion only serves to weaken all religion, for when the dogma and the distinctive devotions go, all we are left with is a kind of vanilla-pudding spirituality. In his recent book The Return of the Strong Gods, Rusty Reno catalogues the concerted effort, after the Second World War, of philosophers, political thinkers, economists, and theologians [...]
"The Green Knight" is probably the best movie adaptation that we Christians could dare hope for from the modern world: well-researched, thoughtful, and meditative. Go see the film. Revel in its beauty. But use your Christian understanding to claim what you want from it so you may better serve Christ. The Green Knight is a [...]
Deeper unconsciousness, not greater awareness, characterizes the modern mind. This may be the fundamental irony of our times. The intersection of ignorance and intention has been the site of art and argument for millennia. Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex explore the limits of knowledge to powerful effect. After visiting the theater, Athenians returned to daily life [...]
As a composer Virgil Thomson was a minor master, but his critical prose ranks with some of the best writing on music in English. To pass from reading a contemporary essayist to one of the middle decades of the 20th century is often to enter another world, one of succinct elegance and inborn culture. The Missouri-born [...]
"Luca" might have “subtexts” that are unhealthy, but its “text” is about outsiders finding acceptance, fatherless children finding fathers, and young people whose talents fit them for things other than goatfish-herding being given the opportunity for school. None of those things belongs to one group exclusively. They belong to all of us who are human. [...]
Larry Elder’s film “Uncle Tom” is a must-see for anybody who thinks all black people think alike or that American black history is simply a history of victimhood. They’re black, they’re proud, and they’re all-American—just like the film they’re in. While it is unlikely that blacks will vote as a majority for Donald Trump or [...]
Documentary filmmaker Cameron O’Hearn's "Mass of the Ages" argues that in the abbreviation of the Roman Catholic liturgy after Vatican II, there was much left out of the Traditional Latin Mass. In an essay about Pope Francis’s recent legal document restricting the practice of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), I wrote that his legislation, though [...]
The next utopia will simply be a new way of life—a “new world order” if you like. It will guarantee the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people through progress and pragmatic solutions. Moral considerations will not apply. While living in the UK, I observed a curious difference between the New World and the [...]
Spinoza has appeared to build upon the edifice of the ancients and the medieval scholastics, but he has actually taken the floor out from under us, so that “God” and “man” no longer mean quite what they did. A wise man has written a book called God or Nothing—the title a profoundly pithy expression of [...]
With its lyrical violin solo voice—at once soaring and nostalgic—"The Lark Ascending” offers a response to the angst in the world, an evocation of the English countryside, a harking back to a simpler, bucolic time that, with the rise of industrialization, seemed to be disappearing before Ralph Vaughan Williams’ very eyes. It is the most [...]
I cannot fully accept the world of John Wick. But like the pagan world and the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye, I cannot fully reject it either. The world of Wick is a world of senseless violence and also violence that is roughly sensible because it is informed by justice. One of the most enjoyable action movie [...]