I had always thought it nonsense to believe in love at first sight. But that sophomoric conceit sank with that setting sun over the Venetian church spires that summer day in 1973. And with it was washed away that companion conceit that falling in love was something that could only happen between two humans… The [...]
Oh, love to some is like a cloud, To some as strong as steel, For some a way of living, For some a way to feel, And some say love is holding on And some say letting go, And some say love is everything And some say they don’t know. John Denver (Perhaps Love) [...]
The apostle Paul counted all things as rubbish except for one thing: an intimate knowledge of Christ characterized by knowing him in the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his suffering, and an identification with his death. Immersion into the life and writings of St. John is a journey into the mind and heart [...]
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” The opening words to Homer’s Odyssey are among the most famous and recognizable in Western literature. That beginning stanza captures so much of the human condition and [...]
The Godfather is the Augustinian film par excellence–though it does not conclude where Augustine's vision ends... The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola is rightly considered a masterpiece. The drama of The Godfather is an epic; it is an epic because [...]
The self is more distant than any star, says G.K. Chesterton, and we can only see the distant star which is the ego by learning to gaze beyond the self to the stars in the sky and the stars that sparkle in the eyes of our neighbours… We live in a seemingly crazy world. A [...]
The totalitarian State wants to control all; it wants to own all that is human, and this includes the erotic, the sexual, and the romantic. By suppressing and controlling these elements in men and women, it hopes to obtain complete domination over every aspect of their humanity... With the publication of Brave New World in [...]
Real, actual letters are a gift, an insight into our best and our worst selves. Unlike the present world of the ephemeral email and hatchet posts on social media, letters of the pre-internet era could be gorgeous works of art. In them, the writer shares just a bit of his soul, preserving it for time, [...]
Jane Austen’s heroines live, choose, and marry according to the highest wisdom about love that is ruled by principle, not convention—by the prudent mind, pure heart, and informed conscience rather than by the false prudence of the world preoccupied by money, image, lust, or self-interest… Readers of Jane Austen’s novels recognize the plot that informs [...]
I sometimes yearn nostalgically for that old fire in her eyes. More twists and turns await my wife and me on this strange voyage to the very ends of sanity and the edges of madness. I know—but hope she does not know—that, as in many adventures, there lurk many more monsters to slay and unspeakable [...]
Chaucer’s satire on innovative theories of marriage and the heresy of courtly love validates the wisdom of the Church’s teaching on hierarchy, fidelity, and indissolubility. The great books or classics of Western civilization reflect the enduring ideals and universal truths that represent a Perennial Philosophy, that is, the sum of the world’s accumulated wisdom over [...]
T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” shows that men do not need more pleasurable escapes or more time, but loving friends and an introduction to reality. They need to listen to human voices instead of the illusive mermaids out in the ocean. And they need to do this before the shock [...]
The purpose of growing old is to grow up. The purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and virtue (the two are synonymous, though the latter word is banned from all polite discourse in our rancid and rotten culture). If one grows old without growing in wisdom, one is a miserable loser. For most [...]
Seeing something noble in Romeo and Juliet’s self-obsessive and self-destructive passion is to see it with eyes that are blind to the moral that Shakespeare teaches. Romeo and Juliet is not the only Shakespeare play that the modern world, modern critics, and modern teachers get wrong. Truth be told, Shakespeare abuse is rampant. Just about every [...]