“Viator Ad Infinitum”
What can bring us happiness when burned into my heart a greater joy, light from your depths, ineffable, for which I long, and tend to stray thin infinite which I have made, not by your light, but by my weariness of sight. […]
Literature, Geography, and Clarity
As the shadow of COVID lifts, let’s hope the thriving business of literary pilgrimages will regain its buoyancy and help us connect the stories that motivate and inspire us with the reality of today’s world. I attended the same high school in Pennsylvania as John Updike. His father bought his pants from my Dad’s clothing [...]
“Elijah”
On me I felt the Lord’s eye look When ravens fed me by the brook; Nor moved from me the Father’s eye In season rich nor season dry. […]
Easter for Misfits
For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]
Should We Pity the Animals of “Animal Farm”?
If we fail to feel any anxiety for the manipulated left, then are we not just like my adolescent students who think that the animals of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” are just stupid? If we do not pity them, aren’t we a part of the proverbial problem? Animal Farm is a work I have taught [...]
The Pilgrim’s Calling: John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”
John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” contains a shift away from institutional idealism and toward a separationist theology that revived the Theology of Calling. It is perhaps the finest work of English nonconformist literature since John Milton and remains unsurpassed more than three centuries later. Next to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, there is no greater representative [...]
“Stations of the Cross”
Station I “Take up your cross and follow me,” you said. We couldn’t know then exactly what you meant, But then they placed the thorns upon your head, And mocked you for their mirthless merriment. Condemned you did not fight their condemnation, While they passed you back and forth like a child’s game. […]
Owen Barfield’s Commonwealth of the Spirit
Owen Barfield called upon the men of the Western world to form themselves into a “commonwealth of the spirit” in which there is no copyright. To create a commonwealth of the soul, we need to know the limits and range of individualism as well as the limits and range of national character. Shortly after Great [...]
The Ancient Liberty of Milton’s Epic Verse
John Milton’s “ancient liberty” is not the liberalism of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, where the telos governing human liberty is dispensed with. Rather, “Paradise Lost” cultivates Christian virtues by reclaiming an ancient liberty within the traditional epic verse form and by returning to that which is first or most ancient: Divine Will. The opening [...]
“The Gift of Lilies”
If angels plucked up blossoms In endless, light-drowned skies, With curved sextuple petals Glowing radiant white, Pearlescent in noon’s light, They shine before my eyes. […]
A Mother’s Tale: Hilda van Stockum’s “The Winged Watchman”
The sharp focus on Mrs. Verhagen gives “The Winged Watchman,” Hilda van Stockum’s novel about a Dutch family during World War II, such power. The close-up tasks of the women are just as heroic as the tasks of the men who often fought to protect their loved ones. Who knew a great war story would [...]
Jane Austen’s Vision of a Happy Marriage
Teaching Jane Austen to high school homeschoolers is a delightful and enlivening experience. In addition to eagerness and enthusiasm, the students bring hearts relatively free of suspicion and agendas. They do not come determined to read post-Christian sensibilities into emphatically Christian texts. I do find, however, that some time must be devoted to negotiating deeply-infused [...]
Disraelian Conservatism & the Romantic Imagination
For the conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the answers to the political problems of the present lie in the restoration of the ideals of the past. Restoration is not an attempt to reject the present and escape or return to an earlier state of a society; it is rather a creative, imaginative effort to infuse the present [...]
“The Green Man in Spring”
His leafy crown grows golden buds as Rain Begins to fill her forest lover’s heart. The weather warms and cools again and again, Just as his heart is warmed and cooled in part. […]