Let us make no mistake. The primary front in our battle in America today lies in our minds, and the most vulnerable minds are those of our children. We can take a stand. Our children can. They will take a stand, but only if we have the calm wisdom of those whose statues are being [...]
Perhaps prison was the very best place to read the "Inferno." Gustave Doré’s engravings on the overhead embellished my lectures, and I immediately noticed my jump-suited students raptly attentive to his vivid representations of Hell’s punishments. “What happens if you’re guilty of more than one of these?” one sheepishly asked. No one laughed. The department [...]
The books we read this past year in the high-school class I dubbed “Evil 12” so accurately portray evil—whether horrific and nightmarish or subtle and uncanny—that they lead the reader to recognize and love goodness all the more. Indeed, each conveys the depths of both evil and goodness in imitation of the Gospel. This past [...]
In reflecting the strangeness of reality and the diabolical darkness of evil, Tim Powers’ "The Mills of the Gods" takes its place alongside other cautionary tales of fictional supernatural realism that prefigure and reflect reality. They show real-life figures in the light of the truth that exposes and vanquishes the diabolical darkness. Not facts first; [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
Remember that Halloween is simply the eve of All Hallows, All Saints Day, which is followed by All Souls Day on the Christian calendar. Death, and one’s own future death in particular, ought to be remembered, but not as a morbid fascination. Rather, it should be meditated on as the inevitable gateway to eternal life [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
What is it that makes life worth living when the temporal aspects of life are taken care of? That is the realm of culture and the spirit. It has to do with the development of our minds, our moral growth, and our sense of belonging to a community. “The empires of the future are the [...]
The way of humility leads, via the rolling road of wonder, to the heaven-haven of the reward. The way of pride leads, via the thorny path of prejudice, to a hell of one’s own devising. “For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” In Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the [...]
While Satan and his legions are known for their subtlety, of late it would seem they have become rather bold. From the Minneapolis shooter drawing a picture of himself staring into a mirror with his reflection not human but a beast with horns, to the recently resigned senior physician at the Centers for Disease Control proudly displaying photos of himself on [...]
The Minneapolis killings prove that evil exists and hates good. The act was so heinous that Satan unmasks himself by showing his role in inspiring the shooter's hateful messages against the Catholic Church. Satan is real and working inside the postmodern world despite the liberal premise to the contrary. He showed his fiendish face at [...]
The culture of death that the government of the UK has unleashed on its own people is all so diabolically ugly that it has something of the character of the caricature. It has the grimness of the grimace of a grotesque gargoyle. There was something darkly comical about the recent revelation that the grandfather of [...]
Victims of obsession, like Bilbo, struggle to see reality clearly, and even more to make the necessary choices. The exorcist, like Gandalf, helps the victim recognize what he is doing that enables the diabolical activity—in this case, keeping the ring—and to renounce whatever it is. “He said that it was ‘growing on his mind,’ and [...]
We now live in a world, as I suppose we always have, that needs to relearn what happened in Oklahoma City 29 years ago. We need to know and feel what radical violence looks like, what it means to snuff out human life for no reason... how it crushes the survivors, and disfigures the communities [...]