Fy on Love without Money! —John Wodroephe, The Spared Hours of a Soldier, 1623 A perennial question for some persons of every generation is: Shall I marry for love or for money? It is typical of the open-minded Shakespeare that he finds nothing wrong with marrying for both. There is in him no niggardly stinginess, no [...]
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love [...]
My grandmother’s passing represents the passing of a historical era; however, her death ultimately symbolizes something at once both far more profound and more commonplace. The most important thing about my grandmother’s death is that it will be undone. My grandmother proposed to my wife months before I did. They’d just met the day before, [...]
Perhaps most readers are familiar with the account of the beginning of the universe found in the Bible: “1 God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth. 2 Earth was still an empty waste, and darkness hung over the deep; but already, over its waters, stirred the breath of God. 3 Then God [...]
The “Darwin loves you” bumper sticker is meant as an ironic insult to one’s Christian neighbours who have “Jesus loves you” bumper stickers on their cars. Those who display this bumper sticker are showing their true kinship to all those who believe in coercion rather than genuine coexistence. They are, therefore, hypocrites. One of the [...]
Love, I think, is a primary component in the metaleptic phenomenon of being and Eternal Being within the tension of existence. It is the experiential insight that gives succor to man’s deformed yearning (sehnsucht) for perfection in life, and it reveals to us that “God can not be contained within reason, because what he does [...]
T.S. Eliot and his second wife, Valerie The struggles of T.S. Eliot’s personal life continue to fascinate both his critics and admirers. Eliot was frustrated and wounded in love, and the women in his life thus assume mythical proportions, as if his life and literature have become a unified drama. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood [...]
An increasing number of Americans are looking to social media and online dating sites like Tinder or OKCupid to meet potential romantic partners. In a Friday column, David Brooks reviews the data presented by the book Dataclysm, written by the creator of OKCupid: People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who [...]
“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” —Dylan Thomas in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Christopher Nolan’s latest offering to cinema aficionados is, I think, a truly spectacular film. In an age when [...]
I over-texted my husband pictures of our thirteen-month-old tonight: First she was eating a meatball; then she was attempting to climb on top of something; then she was on my head, ripping off my glasses. He is working the night shift at the hospital, which means he leaves the house at quarter-to-five p.m. and returns [...]
C. S. Lewis once complained that “Romanticism” was “a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary.”[1] Apart from “the vulgar sense in which a ‘romance’ means simply ‘a love affair,’” Lewis distinguished a further seven kinds of things which are called “romantic.” The paradox is [...]
“And who is my neighbor?” So begins Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, which contains one of the great Christian teachings. Though most are familiar with the parable, it bears repetition. Jesus tells of a man who is overtaken by bandits and left for dead on the side of the road. In this near-death state he [...]
I don’t know where we went wrong, but the feelin’s gone and I just can’t get it back! (Gordon Lightfoot, “If You Could Read My Mind,” 1969) Love never ends. (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:8) To an alien traveler just sauntered in from a far distant part of the universe,it would be quite clear that [...]
(Hans Urs Von Balthasar) I didn't even want to love her but However much we might deny the truth True love is loving the person next to us. Cast out the paralytic demon fear As dawn light breaks upon the darkened down And ordinary happiness abounds. And only realist metaphysics brings The glory transcendental beauty [...]