God suffers evil, in both senses of the word. He allows it in his sufferance and defeats it in his suffering. His eternal will is accomplished in the sufferance and suffering of the Cross, as he tells us in the words he himself utters from the Cross itself. We live in a world in which [...]
The directors of the films "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and "Se7en" make use of the seven deadly sins and the parallel order that opposes them, which are the seven holy virtues: chastity, diligence, temperance, kindness, humility, patience, and charity. Earlier in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (Ealing Studios, 1949), as the protagonist Louis Mazzini [...]
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 recognized as one of the greatest of Shakespearean critics. Yes, there is Dr. Johnson; yes, there [...]
Present in all love is the love that God has for each of His creatures. In loving our neighbor, even the worst sinner, we love what God loves in him. But God’s love for us includes a final judgment about our lives... “Hell is the place God created for the angels who rebelled against him. [...]
When Theodore McCarrick was spooning and fondling seminarians, quite obviously he did not consider how far his enormities would reverberate. At the General Judgement, he will be shown how far his despicable actions have reverberated through society and how they harmed the lives of people he has never met. At the General Judgement, he will know, [...]
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... In the culture of sixteenth-century Europe that witnessed revolutions in geography with [...]
Where are the Flannery O’Connors and Evelyn Waughs of our day, who can be witty about wickedness and plant their theology in the thicket of character, the turns of a plot, and the twist of a knife? Where are the writers who can be both entertaining and enlightening? A Bloody Habit by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson [...]
Is there a difference between evil art and evil in art? Or, to put the matter differently, is there a difference between the dark arts and the art of darkness? As soon as we begin to ponder the relationship between evil and the arts we find ourselves in the realm of paradox. If God is [...]
“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” Editor’s Note: In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis [...]
The so-called Boromir Option raises the question as to whether it is ever permissible to use evil means in pursuit of a good end… In a recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative I wrote about what I called the Mercutio Option, based on the character in Romeo & Juliet who cursed both the warring factions [...]
The Yankee franchise represents the worst side of modern baseball and is thus the fittest of villains in the cosmic drama embodied by the game. "They are the 'Dark Side.' They represent all that is evil about baseball, and about our society in general." —Bill Lee, former major league pitcher It was the late winter [...]