Joy Davidman is such an unsympathetic figure that one must question the judgment and goodness of C.S. Lewis in choosing to marry her. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, ed. by Don W. King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009) I’ve spent the better part of my career as a historian and a [...]
We are not born into a savage wilderness but into a beautiful mansion of the Lord that the Lord and those who have gone before us have built. We must avoid neglecting this mansion but rather glorify and preserve it—as we should all of the Lord’s Creation. Whit Stillman, in the novel version of his [...]
Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a magnificent Jane Austen adaptation, not least because it conceives of the perfect ending for the unpolished project of Austen’s juvenescence, Lady Susan. This is Jane Austen, and it is a comedy, so of course there must be a wedding at the end. But how does one best pull [...]
Because Whit Stillman has adapted Jane Austen’s Lady Susan for his new movie, Love & Friendship, it is worth asking the question: Will most people find that Mr. Stillman has discovered, in this early work of Austen, something new and unfamiliar about her, and made it accessible? The question is prompted by the reports of [...]
C.S. Lewis’ best novel, That Hideous Strength (1945), is a story first and foremost about marriage. As Lewis properly understood it, marriage is our first and most important institution in resisting evil as well as the ever-looming and hovering chaos of our modern and post-modern whirligig we call "Western society." "Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said [...]
T.S.Eliot argued that the biographical details of the poet were irrelevant to the understanding of the poetry, and yet his own poetry is so deeply personal that it often remains obtuse until illuminated by an understanding of his personal life. Eliot’s masterpiece—The Four Quartets—are the perfect example, and Burnt Norton—the first of the four—reveals its [...]
What’s the big deal about facing death if you know you are going to be saved? Mr. Christopher Nolan has asked us to consider this question so many times it would be impolite of us not to oblige him. His films The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), and Interstellar (2014) each run an experiment upon the [...]
Love is the basic act and order of all things because all things are created by God. The most basic fact or truth of all things is at once their analogically conceived goodness or value as gift, a giftedness that is intrinsic to each thing by virtue of its being generated by the generosity of [...]
Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and [...]
O my luve is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June; O my luve is like the melodie, That’s sweetly play’d in tune. So fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. [...]
Many good and worthy people in the past have found the experience of imprisonment a crucial and definitive period on their road towards faith and religious conversion, or as a means of deepening an already existing faith. Saint John of the Cross springs to mind, as does Miguel Cervantes, and the great Nicolae Steinhardt, whose [...]
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane, Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey, And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day? Is it thy will—Love that I love so well— That my Soul’s House should be a tortured spot Wherein, like [...]
Can the culture of life take root and flourish in the very midst of the culture of death? This crucial question is answered in the affirmative by the Missionaries of the Poor, one of the fastest growing religious orders in the Church today. Father Richard Ho Lung founded the Brothers of the Poor, as they [...]
A stranger came to the door at eve, And he spoke the bridegroom fair. He bore a green-white stick in his hand, And, for all burden, care. He asked with the eyes more than the lips For a shelter for the night, And he turned and looked at the road afar Without a window light. [...]