With an unsettling sense of déjà vu I watched the events in Charlottesville unfold. I had seen it all before, not merely as a passive spectator watching it happen on television but as an active participant, feeling the rage and the anger and experiencing the violence at first hand… As I read reports of the violence [...]
Through reading the works of Charles Dickens, we may be inspired to take a closer look at our own priorities and come to a deeper understanding of our inability to embody perfectly our own ideals. Throughout the career of the esteemed literary giant Charles Dickens, selfless love as opposed to selfishness served as an underlying [...]
What right do I have to be walking in His Love and not reaping the miserable harvest of the hateful seeds I had sown? I have no right. It’s not about rights, but about Love and the mercy which is its fruit… In C.S. Lewis’s magical tale, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the [...]
As a professor who values intelligence, I tend to like most those students who talk to me about books and ideas. Yet recently when a student, unasked, quietly shoveled the snow from my sidewalk, he taught me a lesson about a profound depth of goodness that I need to study up on. G.K. Chesterton joked, [...]
The vivid love-speeches of the Symposium come to us, reach us, through several layers of incomplete remembrance, and as though from a mythic past. Symposium (or Drinking Party) by Plato, translated and edited by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Hackett, 2017) Why hast thou nothing in thy face? Thou idol of the human [...]
No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live. Having a vastly richer interior life, we humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living, and we must recognize the most fundamental principle of human life: By nature every person is meant to love and be loved. I don’t know about [...]
My Love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high: It was begotten by despair Upon Impossibility. Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing, Where feeble Hope could ne’r have flown But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing. […]
When a character imitates the desire of another character, the differences between them dissolve as the similarities in desire increase. This pattern of “undifferentiation” is more and more evident in the plays of the mature Shakespeare, such as “The Taming of the Shrew,” “As You Like It,” and “Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s [...]
The sobering lesson that Romeo and Juliet teaches is that the thing possessed possesses the possessor. Juliet is Romeo’s beginning and his end… Oh what’s love got to do, got to do with it, What’s love but a second hand emotion; What’s love got to do, got to do with it, Who needs a heart [...]
Ultimately the reason we should rejoice in the love of laughter as we rejoice in the love of friends is that laughter, like love, is a gift of God. There’s nothing worth the wear of winning Than laughter and the love for friends. These famous lines by Hilaire Belloc are personal favourites of mine but, [...]
Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde should prompt us to search for an antidote to the lovers’ death wish—to pursue a love that preserves rather than destroys, celebrates rather than abolishes individuality, and seeks life rather than death. “They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I come [...]
What is one to think of those who not only refuse to learn the lessons that the gift of disabled children teach us but seek to exterminate the teachers so that they don’t have to learn the lessons?… A couple of months ago, whilst visiting the University of Mary in North Dakota to give a [...]
Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining [...]
My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end…. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. These words from G.K. Chesterton’s autobiography have [...]