Ricky Jay was born in 1948 and died last Saturday. He was the greatest magician in America for more than a generation and a character whose like we will not see again. He combined the all-American love of...
Despite their obscurity, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were Shakespeare's best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular?
In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith...
Russell Kirk’s horror stories are fundamentally conservative, insinuating a chain of being that connects the living and the dead, reminding us of our duty and obligations to the past. They challenge us by piercing our day-to-day sense of the temporal with bright flashes of eternal order. And...
The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight...
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s "Miserere" and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn't stop the teenaged Mozart...
Relentless Rationalism burns up the "life, mind, morality and reason" of man, seeing in the ashes the only true liberation of humanity...
“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which...
We can approach the miracles and mysteries of the Bible, accepting the possibility of their essential historicity while allowing for elaboration, exaggeration, and the misunderstandings of the pre-scientific mind...
I have had a terrific time researching and...
To link spiritualism, political philosophy, and play together is, at first sight, rash. What could they possibly have in common, since they clearly are not the same?...
Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me...
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House revolves around three intrepid explorers who accept Professor Montague’s invitation to spend a summer living there, getting to know one another and getting to know—intimately—the workings of the house...
In the murder mystery, the portrayal of an apparent Eden is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored...
I was an Anglican curate when I saw the sun spin. It happened like this. One of the teenagers in the parish had been to Medjugorje and suddenly got keen on the Blessed Virgin Mary....
A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. These need not be full-scale epiphanies or blasts of revelation. As instances of what I...
Eric Voegelin, one of the greatest minds of our times, died on January 19, 1985. We stand in awe, admiration, and affection as we now try to obtain an overview of his achievement....
No, not all conspiracies are hallucinations, nor are all conspiracy theorists crazy or even libertarians. Here our sensible, responsible, even somewhat boring experts present the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories that everyone can trust.
1. Hillary Clinton is a Kleptomaniac
