In “Till We Have Faces,” the story of Orual and Psyche which Lewis weaves is so powerful because it presents us with the hope that even the greatest cruelty perpetrated by selfish love can be forgiven by true love. Picture the scene, cliché as it is: A young teenager’s parents have just refused her permission [...]
Our modern lives need beauty, because, in the machine-like pace of modern life and the machine-like culture, there is not much beauty to be found. Nathaniel Hawthorne pointedly illustrates in “The Artist of the Beautiful” the cost of valuing the practical over the Beautiful. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful,” [...]
History’s tyrants and thieves remain with us, and if things get very dark sometimes, then my best hope is to do the right thing in the light of His Grace. That’s all I can hope to do, passing on that Grace whenever I can. It’s strange how I can’t remember this guy’s whole name [...]
During the last third of the twentieth century, Walker Percy was a force to be reckoned with, as essayist, philosopher, vocal Catholic, and, especially, as a prize-winning novelist, often best-selling. (He was considered a first-class stylist.) Describable, I think, as “psychological gothic” (and Southern, though he came to hold no truck with Faulkner), those [...]
Throughout history, cultures have always developed fantastical tales of heroes and gods and monsters and demons. Whether they are tales of the Greek Pantheon, Norse gods, or modern-day superheroes, these tales grasp the imagination and transport the hearer to a different realm full of possibility. The question then arises in my mind: Are these [...]
The fear of the coronavirus allows our governing bodies to keep us in isolation and the consequences of our permitting this act are more pernicious than we can imagine. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” has never appeared less fictional. And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the [...]
Director Greta Gerwig’s film “Little Women” ends as Louisa May Alcott’s novel does, with a family-centered fall festival at Plumfield. Perhaps unintentionally, Ms. Gerwig captures the spirit of Alcott’s beautiful ending to her novel. Not only has she married off the heroine, but she has shown marriage to be far more than an economic [...]
Far from calling for microscopic views of reality and fishbowls, tragedies call for us to shatter the fishbowls and throw out the microscopes, to stop obsessing about our vulnerabilities and on how to overcome them, to stop thinking of ourselves as helpless victims of wicked forces. It is a grey day today. The sun [...]
The paradoxical heart of G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” is the tension that exists between the childlikeness demanded by Christ and the childishness that St. Paul tells us to avoid. The first is the wisdom of innocence, or the sanity of sanctity, whereby we see the miracle of life with eyes full [...]
The Saint Brendan of Frederick Buechner’s novel is like all the saints who learn that the greatest journey is one that leads from the glorious but seed-like natural energy and strength of youth, to the final flowering of spiritual life and power that are only attained through prayer, surrender, and many crosses. For Roman [...]
Little did Ray Bradbury know of his prescience in 1951, as he criticized society’s obsession with screens and the far-ranging effects of technology. Could television supersede community? Could it control us to the point of isolation and loneliness? Bradbury’s writing gives us much to think about. I am haunted by a lonely man. At [...]
Charles Dickens’ Bleak House is considered by most contemporary critics to be his best novel and, although the postmodernist intellectual community should be navigated with caution, I am inclined to agree. It’s richly complex with an eclectic array of subplots, characters, and themes, and concludes with a bitter-sweet ending that is, unlike many contemporary [...]
During the spring semester of 1957, the University of Chicago invited a number of distinguished speakers to campus to lecture on the meaning and significance of science fiction as a genre. Robert Heinlein, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Bloch, and Alfred Bester each gave insightful speeches, all of which were collected by Basil Davenport and published [...]
With twenty stories, accompanied by lush but tenebrous full-page images, Sam Weller’s “Dark Black” is a thing of haunting beauty and voluptuous terrors. Dark Black, by Sam Weller (254 pages, Hat & Beard Press, 2020) Most readers of The Imaginative Conservative know Sam Weller as the extraordinary biographer of Ray Bradbury and as the [...]