Though somewhat disputed as to just how much each person contributed to the creation of the character and backstory of The Batman, both Robert Kane (born Robert Kahn; 1915-1998), as credited in the first story, and Milton Bill Finger (1914-1974), not credited, invented the character. The two had actually teamed up during the several [...]
Against the suffocating world of Nazism, communism, Holocaust camps, and gulags, imagination found a new life in the 1940s and 1950s, as artists strove for a renewal of beauty, goodness, and truth. It is only in this context that one can understand the rise of the “superhero,” among whom none have endured as well [...]
C.S. Lewis’ famous conversation with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, allowed him, for the first time in his life, to see that Christianity expresses not just myth, but true myth, something profoundly real, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” [...]
As Christopher Dawson argued, the nineteenth century proved a short century. When the century began, Thomas Jefferson delivered his gorgeous blueprint for a liberal republican world in the form of the first inaugural address. “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the [...]
Friedrich Nietzche’s Ecce Homo lays waste to centuries of an ethic of inhibition and restraint. Intellectually brutalized, bloodied, and tortured, the nineteenth-century philosopher presented himself in his final and last words to a world he wanted to overthrow. Behold the man. To be more accurate, behold the demon. In his mockingly titled autobiography and final published [...]
James Como’s C.S Lewis: A Very Short Introduction is delightful and is the single finest biographical survey yet written on the Oxford don. In a little more than one hundred pages, you’ll happily come to know the complexities of the most famous convert to Christianity in the twentieth century. C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, [...]
In a world that demands and encourages immediate reaction and instantaneous anger, serious writing allows us to turn toward the good, the true, and the beautiful in a meaningful manner, a manner worthy of our ancestors and of our children and grandchildren. I’ve had the compulsion (yes, the correct word, I think) to write [...]
Growing up in a small but well-to-do Kansas town, I had access to several local bookshops—used and new—in grade school. Every bookstore offered joys, mysteries, and delights. Rarely have I walked into one and not found some kind of treasure. A few weeks ago, while lecturing for a Hillsdale College event in Boise, Idaho, [...]
Few things in life have given me as much pleasure as writing has. I’ve never been what anyone would describe as “low-energy,” but I’ve also not always been exactly sure how to release my own energies, especially when it came to writing. I’ve also always possessed the creative impulse, but that impulse was frustrated [...]
On February 25, 2019, at age sixty-four, Mark David Hollis passed away. Though he had not been active for more than two decades in the music industry, his death is a great loss to the art world. Hollis was the “J.D. Salinger of the rock world” but, frankly, much cooler and much more talented. He [...]
C.S. Lewis’s writings are endlessly fascinating because the man himself was endlessly fascinating—to himself as well as to others. He saw life as a sort of drama and art, one in which the will shapes what Providence has so generously provided. One can readily and happily delve into C.S. Lewis’s autobiography of 1955, Surprised [...]
I loved every moment of the process of research—from the initial stages of utter bewilderment to the compilation of data to imagining and completing the final form of the paper. I knew what I loved, and I knew what I wanted to do with my life. In some way or shape or form, I [...]
I first came across Russell Kirk’s belief that academics must serve as guardians of “the Word” in his groundbreaking but now sadly-neglected book, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (1955). “The principle support to academic freedom, in the classical world, the medieval world, and the American educational tradition, has been the conviction, among scholars and [...]
Not only is the art of making a book sacred, but, when done well, the words within those books are sacred as well. After all, Christ came as the Word, and words, when properly understood, reflect His eternal glory and dignity, even if confined to ink on a page… From the moment I read [...]