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 [...]
The very word “civilization” is now politically charged, implying as it does hierarchies of achievement and value judgments. That someone would say that our culture is better than any other, or that some other culture is deficient in some way, is the kind of thing that causes fainting spells among our intellectual class… Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” [...]
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 [...]
The American indie director Whit Stillman has made only five movies, but if you’re an aspiring cineaste, you need to see them all. Focusing exclusively on young members of the upper crust, Mr. Stillman humanizes a class of people typically derided for belonging to the privileged one percent. Mr. Stillman endears audiences to his heroes [...]
The narrative of the film The Greatest Showman is familiar, but the narrative is wrong. It insists that there is this creative and wonderful minority of show freaks that is being kept down by the haters because of who they are. But in actuality, faithful Christians are the freaks, not the LGBTs… Hollywood has produced a terrific, though [...]
The Seventh Seal is focused on man’s spiritual doubt, and even complete lack of faith in God. The film asks: How can God remain separate from us as we experience darkness and suffering? The Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, has secured his place in the cinematic canon not only as a superb and unique director but [...]
Art, understood as a medium that engages the imagination and desires of its audience, can lure out aspects of its audience that would otherwise be kept hidden. Awareness of what desires the art excites and how one’s imagination is played upon can afford a perceptive viewer an opportunity to gain knowledge both of himself and [...]
The principal difficulty of mankind today is the decay of the moral imagination in our civilization… In the spring of 1989, videographer Ken Martinek and I made the trip to Piety Hill to interview Russell about the moral imagination (as first conceived by Edmund Burke and expanded by Dr. Kirk). This concept had held an [...]
While Netflix’s “The Crown” may not be a perfectly accurate documentary on the reign of Elizabeth II, it is certainly a powerful and poignant drama. When people ask how I get so much done I like to quip, “I don’t watch TV.” It’s not really the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. [...]
The Mayberry that we see in the first few seasons of “The Andy Griffith Show” is systematically undermined, desecrated, and destroyed by the iconoclasm of sixties’ ideological hedonism. Believe it or not, I had never heard of Andy Griffith until I was forty years old. For some reason, The Andy Griffith Show had never made [...]
The Last Jedi seems intent on burning down the archetypes of the heroic past. When the hero fails to be a hero, and furthermore denies his own status as a hero, what is the rationality behind such postmodern disenchantment? Moviegoers have loudly lamented the Luke Skywalker they encountered in Rian Johnson’s newest episode of the [...]
The body language of the band is one of a frozen watchfulness. Each band member has the look and stance of one who has witnessed something truly awful, and yet is powerless to do anything about it. Before their eyes, what the Rolling Stones were witnessing was the ending of a life… It was to [...]
It has been quipped that every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him. If you really want to know James Bond you need to read Ian Fleming’s novels. They are ripping good adventure stories, just like the movies. However, the literary Bond also has a lot more seriousness [...]
For students of leadership for a just society, the movie “Ride the High Country” crystallizes beliefs and codes of behavior worth studying, affirming, and claiming today. If you want to know what made the statesman and military leader George Catlett Marshall (1880–1959) great, then watch Ride the High Country (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and you will receive a taste of [...]