No doubt, we can continue to argue about which is the best translation of "The Iliad." However, those of us who rejoice in the beauty of language and the brilliance of great poetry cannot help but marvel at Alexander Pope’s telling of the tale of Troy. It was the best of times, it was the [...]
As an English professor who has taught the Odyssey every semester for the last 35 years, along with a dozen or so film classes on Hitchcock, Capra, musicals, Hollywood studios, and film classics, I awaited the release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey with great anticipation. Overall, I was impressed by the film and by Nolan’s fresh [...]
The problem with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, ironically, that it is too Christian. Despite the hubbub from some online conservatives screaming about how “woke” it is (usually before seeing it), the real deficiency of the movie is that it whitewashes the barbarity of the ancient world. It makes Odysseus seem like a Christian, at least [...]
An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one’s own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition. My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of [...]
What is the good of seeing a terrible state of soul displayed onstage, disclosed in all its humiliation and rage? After my first morning of classes at Wyoming Catholic College on August 27, I returned to the office to find the news of the shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis all over the internet. [...]
Sign up for Joseph Pearce’s course on Classical Epic and Tragedy this Fall: https://rosary.college/applicant-registration/ What do the great literary epics tell us about the epochs in which they were written? And, more important, what do these epics and epochs tell us about our own epoch? To what extent are literary epics the children of their [...]
Like the Greek tragic heroes of Oedipus and Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer used his almost superhuman intellect and ability to achieve something that led not only to his own suffering, but also to the suffering of others. Americans today would do well to heed the lessons passed down from the Greek tragedians about the reckless [...]
As we are forced into isolation and confronted by our mortality in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we begin to ask ourselves an important question: What does it mean to be human? Gleaves Whitney, Director of Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, and Winston Elliott III, The Imaginative Conservative’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, [...]
We know that Socrates was accused of introducing new gods and of corrupting the youth. But what was Socrates’ true position concerning the gods? Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join the late Nalin Ranasinghe, as he analyzes the essence of piety as expressed in Plato’s Euthyphro. —W. Winston [...]
One of the most defining aspects of our humanity is love. We are creatures of affectivity made in love for love. It is the recognition of this fact that makes Homer so eternal: his heroes are heroes of love. In a cosmos governed by lust, strife, and war, the loving deeds of our Homeric heroes stand out. [...]
The human characters of Homer’s grand epic, the “Iliad,” embody what Homer is driving home at with his poem: the tension between strife and love. Achilles transforms from a rage-filled and strife-filled killer to a forgiving lover touched by the very power of love. Homer’s Iliad is the defining epic of Western literature. Its heroes [...]
What we need today to re-create the beautiful city, an icon through which to see the glorious City of God, is a new “Iliad,” a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty.” In his Metamorphoses of the City, Catholic [...]
Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by “poet” I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I We not only read a novel, we enter into its created world. We [...]
We know that Socrates was accused of introducing new gods and of corrupting the youth. But what was Socrates’ true position concerning the gods? “One Being, the only truly wise, does not and does agree to be called Zeus.” – Heraclitus This reading of the Euthyphro will grapple with the accusations of impiety leveled against [...]