So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]
Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]
If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]
Even in God's majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity. Death is a part of [...]
When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]
Having more enemies, I believe, will sharpen my mind to the reality that in this new year I will have many fights that I must fight and also many opportunities to become perfect in the way that God alone has set out—by loving my enemies. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I rarely make [...]
The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]
Jesus is the only final safety we have in the world. We need to convey that truth. But we also need to convey that what He asks of those who want this safety is something that is simultaneously absolutely dangerous to us here and now, in all senses of the word. A friendly acquaintance on [...]
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” wrestles with the death of the poet’s closest friend, a death that pushed Tennyson into a bout of depression and an immense wallowing sorrow. But the poem is also an attempt to draw near the transformative power of love—a love that turns the cold and bleak midwinter into the high noon of [...]
I knew she was dying and I tried to make the most of it. But ever since she died that same feeling is still there; that same regret, that same wish that I just need one more day, one more chance to tell her I love her, one more chance to kiss her, to thank [...]
We cannot repair the past. But we owe it to the past to make a better future. It is a fine line that we draw every day, reflecting on the past to improve the future, while not dwelling there so much that we forsake the future. The only sure path out of this quandary is [...]
I live among the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the ambitious and the lazy, the good and the bad, the loving and the hateful. Grappling with death taught me how to live in this world. I now see that every person I meet in ordinary, daily affairs is part human and [...]
sometimes, i am unsure how to survive surviving. i miss the chance to be better for her, better, kinder, truer, more patient, more loving more selfless. and i am so happy these days, so miserably happy. i have so much happiness and a surfeit of blessings: stalwart friends and steadfast family; new life and new [...]
In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith was absolutely right: The widespread division of labor would cause the interior life to die; an unsurprising result, for under capitalism, the human person became a commodity, a resource, a thing used to further profits. My parents, Romanian gypsies, born in a Transylvanian village and raised in thatched-roofed [...]