“Leave It to Beaver” was very much a medieval morality play, in which the character of the Beaver repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue. Russell Kirk defined the moral imagination as “an enduring source of inspiration that elevates us to first principles as it guides [...]
Machismo is the failure to grow into the fullness of what it means to be a man. The mark of machismo is the boast and braggadocio of the braggart. It is the mask of pride, worn by those who lack humility… Once upon a time, when I was a boy, I recall watching a Western [...]
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 [...]
The sexual revolution has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness. Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim… What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of [...]
The message is loud and clear. Your actions have no more significance than those of a cockroach. Furthermore, like a cockroach, you are in no position to make moral choices of your own free will. When you commit some hideous brutality, it is not that you decided to do so. No, on the contrary, external [...]
All that is needed for a happy divorce between God and Caesar is for the leaders of Christian churches to make a declaration of independence from the power of the state. One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to believe that holy matrimony has anything whatsoever to do with a secular understanding [...]
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 [...]
For decades, now, Christians have worried about the progressive push to strip naked the public square by forcing religion into the shadows of a private sphere. Recent events have made clear that this is not the case. Everything is public and political to the secular left. All aspects of our lives are fair game in [...]
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 [...]
Marriage is a universal institution of civilization. We find no human society in which marriage has not existed in some form, and virtually all marriage ceremonies historically have involved religious elements. Yet for many years now, natural (“traditional”) marriage and the family have become the subjects of secular ridicule, with the family increasingly politicized and [...]
The controversy over a Super Bowl ad for a snack chip that allegedly “humanized,” of all things, a pre-born human being highlights the deliberate rejection of reality of the “abortion rights” objectors. On its face, as others have noted, the controversy exposes the pernicious obfuscation that a fetus is nothing more than a “meaningless blob [...]
What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst [...]