Against the suffocating world of Nazism, communism, Holocaust camps, and gulags, imagination found a new life in the 1940s and 1950s, as artists strove for a renewal of beauty, goodness, and truth. It is only in this context that one can understand the rise of the “superhero,” among whom none have endured as well [...]
Oh, love to some is like a cloud, To some as strong as steel, For some a way of living, For some a way to feel, And some say love is holding on And some say letting go, And some say love is everything And some say they don’t know. John Denver (Perhaps [...]
The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Yet many of the giants were not heroes, and many of the heroes were not giants. Hitler was a giant, as were Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Each of these Nietzschean supermen was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. As for the heroes, one [...]
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory. – J.R.R. Tolkien Together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat. – Galadriel My kingdom is not of this [...]
A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness [...]
Integrity inspires success on the battlefield and in the bureaucracy. Good officers have the mental stamina to find the right thing to do, and they have the moral stamina to do it. The Church will never be reformed until we have Church leaders who are holy, orthodox, and wise… Blessed be the Lord, my rock who [...]
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?… Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, [...]
Humanity is mystified by Love. All humans experience it. None can explain it. The mysterious genesis of this strange gift, the wondrous beginnings of this bizarre quality within the human heart prompts the greatest quest of all: the quest for Love… My friend Carol is a writer of medical romantic fiction. This does not [...]
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 [...]
By viewing Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a type of saintly hagiography, and Quixote’s actions and motives as following the example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Don Quixote turns into San Quixote, a knight who fights not on the plains of Spain but on a spiritual plane, by means of his illuminating imagination… Gallivanting through the [...]
The perennial moral that Wonder Woman learns is that evil, and the war which is one of its manifestations, can never be finally destroyed in human history… It’s been many years since I’ve been in the habit of watching films. It’s not because I’ve turned my back on the motion picture as an art [...]
There is, in myth, a recurring structure that, once deconstructed, indicates how myth is generated. Myth hides the truth about its “missing link” to reality: namely, the real and innocent victims of a sacrificial crisis.[1] In the myth of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, one key element of this recurring structure is the role [...]
Someone once cracked wise by saying, “Everyone has a book in them…and for most people that’s where it should stay.” Therefore when someone sends me the manuscript, the book, the outline for a book, or a book idea, I usually shrink. When a friend sends me a copy of his book I shrink into [...]
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. There are many stories as to its actual beginnings, with over two dozen cities and towns laying claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. There is also evidence that organized women’s groups in [...]