The Banner of Trust: The Holy Land

By |2024-03-04T19:49:46-06:00March 3rd, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Poetry, Sainthood|

For nearly two thousand years, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land has been the pinnacle of Christian religious experience and a byword for trust in divine providence. There is one place that captivates the pilgrim more than all the rest. Because in the most consequential of lands, it is the most consequential city this side [...]

Reading 100-Year-Old Books

By |2024-02-27T19:31:21-06:00February 26th, 2024|Categories: Books, Literature|

In February of 2022, I began a new tradition that I hope to maintain. It stemmed from a keen desire to become more familiar with the great literary works of the 20th century. So, last year I decided to read one work published or written exactly one century in the past. Thus, 2022 corresponded to [...]

Sir Martin Gilbert and the Inklings

By |2024-02-23T18:05:16-06:00February 23rd, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christianity, Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, Oxford University, Timeless Essays|

Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, knew J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings personally. At one memorable lunch, Sir Martin gave me his impressions of these great men and of the Oxford of their day. During my time at Hillsdale College—having arrived in the fall of 1999—the college hired a number [...]

The Humanity of Huck Finn

By |2024-02-17T17:29:52-06:00February 17th, 2024|Categories: Books, Christine Norvell, Fiction, Literature, Mark Twain, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Virtue, Wisdom|

Huckleberry Finn is no hero, though he does symbolize the American conscience at the time Mark Twain wrote, or at least the conscience Twain hoped for. Yes, "Huckleberry Finn" is a coming-of-age tale and a social criticism and satire, but it also asks crucial questions: Who actually changes? What type of American will change? Huckleberry [...]

St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

By |2024-02-15T20:13:18-06:00February 15th, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, StAR, Timeless Essays|

As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]

Truth and Masks in Chesterton

By |2024-02-07T20:44:24-06:00February 7th, 2024|Categories: G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Oscar Wilde, Senior Contributors|

"Orthodoxy" ends with Chesterton delving deep into the divine comedy at the heart of all things. If angels can fly because they take themselves lightly, does God take Himself lightly? In a recent essay, I wrote about truth and masks in the world and works of Oscar Wilde. As a follow-up, I’d like to focus [...]

“God’s Own Descent”: Dante, the Incarnation, & Frost’s “The Trial by Existence”

By |2024-02-06T19:56:27-06:00February 6th, 2024|Categories: Dante, Literature, Poetry, Robert Frost|

“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of "Paradiso" by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. But God's own descent [...]

Swimming Against the Stream

By |2024-01-31T18:51:26-06:00January 31st, 2024|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Poetry, Senior Contributors|

Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend. Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose by Regina Derieva, translated by various (156 pages, Marick Press, 2019) Images in Black, Continuous, by Regina Derieva, translated [...]

Darwin, Bureaucratese, and the Decline of Poetry

By |2024-01-30T19:17:26-06:00January 30th, 2024|Categories: Poetry|

I want to begin by asking a simple question: Why has poetry descended from being a great delight to a miserable bore for the majority of the populace? This was not always the case. Poet Magaret Randall helps us to see: Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed from hand to [...]

The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost

By |2024-01-28T20:31:55-06:00January 28th, 2024|Categories: Books, Peter Stanlis, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet [...]

Truth and Masks in the World of Wilde

By |2024-01-25T18:37:08-06:00January 25th, 2024|Categories: Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors|

In 1885 Oscar Wilde wrote “The Truth of Masks,” in which he claimed that there was no such thing in art as a universal truth. Attitude, he wrote, was everything. The truth, or otherwise, of masks is crucial to any understanding of Wilde’s complex and conflicted character. His public persona, cultivated and constructed from his [...]

T.S. Eliot: The Light Invisible

By |2024-01-26T05:55:11-06:00January 25th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Books, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The modern secularist, T.S. Eliot argued, finds meaning either in the brute forces of the physical world or the arbitrary freeplay of the mind or the passing consensus of the human tribe. Looking for meaning in these places has not only led individuals to a sense of nihilism but has led whole nations to slaughter [...]

Can Something Be ‘Great’, Even If You Hate It?

By |2024-01-22T22:00:02-06:00January 22nd, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Literature|

I don’t really care for C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. I sympathize with the allegory Lewis was trying to present throughout the series, but I felt that it was too overt in places, and took away from the overall narrative. To me, it was distracting. But even though I didn’t personally enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia, I [...]

A Foray Into Metaphysical Poetry With John Donne

By |2024-01-21T19:11:57-06:00January 21st, 2024|Categories: John Donne, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Something about the way in which metaphysical poetry engages the mind is unique to this style of verse. A combination of relatable simplicity with conceptual eclecticism renders it into a form of expression that can be deeply and personally felt by the reader, but only once he works through the poet’s intricate analogies and “metaphysical” [...]

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