Good fiction deals with powerful themes and does so by embedding them in the plot line and character arc—so the word becomes flesh. This is the power of great drama and fiction: that we get caught up in the story and the emotion opens our heart, and...
Back in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s an evil regime, inspired by the relativist ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, sought to breed a master race, practicing eugenics to eliminate those it considered subhuman (untermenschen), including...
In Othello, William Shakespeare, the philosopher of everyday life, holds up a mirror to us and shows us what human beings are capable of. Beneath our most pleasantly cultivated exterior, there often lurks a serpent...
William Hazlitt is widely...
So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir's film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated...
Whereas heroic missionary effort and martyrdom seemed the hallmark of the first Jesuits, the second generation moved in a different direction...
In the Roman calendar, October is a harvest for militant saints. Kicking off with Saint Therese of Lisieux...
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender...
Despite the number of times the witches repeat “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Macbeth testifies to the objectivity of natural law and universal knowledge of good and evil known to conscience and written on the heart and mind of all persons...
Except for mystics, the goal of Western philosophers and theologians has been to find the right ideas, whereas Eastern thinkers seek the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things. I wish to suggest that the Western and Eastern paths to the true,...
Machiavelli can enter public debate not merely as a wicked man concerned only with power and political maneuvering, but as a philosopher with myriad insights to offer modern politics, politicians, and even apolitical members of the public... Be Like...
Friedrich Nietzsche has no explanation for the process by which Christianity conquered Rome, by which the strong accepted the morality of the weak. When it comes to a depth of understanding of the development of Christianity, William Shakespeare is the true superman...
Much of suffering is an impenetrable mystery. But to a limited degree, we are able to understand suffering if we can come to understand what love is... Pope John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris,...
The abuse of opioids, like other addictions, stems from a profound spiritual problem deep inside the souls of countless Americans. But when people turn to the sublimity of heavenly things, they acquire the ability to overcome their frenetic appetites and look for spiritual solutions...
The end of the scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship. The end is never the production of a work of art, however grand in conception, successful in execution, or exquisite in finish; but the realization...
The core of René Girard's thought seems to center around the fundamental conviction that mimetic desire is the desire for God... In a recent essay in this journal, Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski makes the bold...
