Our lives are marked by reversals and recognitions for which we are rarely prepared. That change will come is certain, whether on the stage or in your home. The only question is how you will receive it when it comes. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, [...]
The world is often unkind to women, using them as pawns in a masculine game of war and power and possession. But these wrongs will not be righted by inviting women to participate in the same game. They will be righted only when the voice of the feminine is allowed to be heard: in the [...]
On this earth, there is nothing more firm, more noble, more intransigent than the heroic character. I encourage you, children of the twenty-first century, to respect such heroes, even as you fear them and pray that your fate will not be like theirs. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great [...]
Hearing T.S. Eliot's poems read brings us back to the haunting beauty of the words themselves, and hearing the words unlocks Eliot’s powerful imagery, just as he would have wanted. Jeremy Irons' classic rendition empowers this strange transaction, and through the words we are taken beyond the words to the realm of the Word. Those [...]
Some adages are so well-worn by constant use and abuse that they are considered truisms. We begin to assume that they are true without really thinking about them, making truth itself both trite and trivial. One such adage is the belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Such a belief makes beauty [...]
The people of your age, just like the people of my own, want to cling to one of two false ideals: that we have no real choice; that we can choose but that our choices are simple, straightforward, and easily revoked. But neither is true to the deep reality that we are moral, ethical beings [...]
O, ye self-protective children of the twenty-first century, I hope you will see that suffering can be redemptive, that it can bridge the gap between where we are and where we hope to be. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages [...]
Justice is that which breaks us out of the cycle of vengeance. It achieves a higher vision that considers motives (and not just actions), causes (and not just effects), purposes (and not just naked facts). The triumph of justice does not signify the total defeat of vengeance, but its transformation into something beneficent. Author’s Introduction: [...]
Author's Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages had been given the gift, not only to peer into the twenty-first century, but to correspond with we who live in that most confusing and rudderless of centuries. Had it been in their power [...]
A new film, simply titled Tolkien, purports to depict the author’s formative years as a child and young man, but will, I fear, show only a perverted and distorted version of the truth, weaving lies in a manner of which Wormtongue himself would be proud... I hate to say it, but I think that Wormtongue [...]
There is dignity and value in work. You who live in America once knew this. You did not think lesser of a man because he got his hands dirty with honest toil. To the contrary, you thought it a grand thing to build and to create. But all that has changed... Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]
I have read your books, and I have discovered that many of you believe that people are products of their environment. How can you believe such things, and yet deny altogether the influence of the past? Nature may give us robust health or leave us scarred, but her traces upon us are minor things compared [...]
The imagination is a gift from God, given in His own image, to conceive of a Glorious Reality that does exist, that we cannot yet fully see... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Aaron Ames, as he considers the Divine source of beauty and imagination.—W. Winston Elliott [...]
Oh, dear sons of the twenty-first century, do not balk at those who call you to live up to your father’s reputation. Do not define yourself against him, as so many of your age have done. If you do, you will dash yourselves on the rocks and miss out on your greater calling... Author’s Introduction: [...]