Dwight Longenecker

Michelangelo’s Last “Pieta”

The Florentine Pieta was not commissioned. Instead, Michelangelo intended it for his own tomb. He worked on the sculpture in his spare time, late into the night with a candle fixed to his hat for light. Today’s offering in...

Eliot and Irons

Hearing T.S. Eliot's poems read brings us back to the haunting beauty of the words themselves, and hearing the words unlocks Eliot’s powerful imagery, just as he would have wanted. Jeremy Irons' classic rendition empowers this strange transaction, and through the words we are taken beyond the words to...

My Kinship With Cain: What I Have Learned From My Prison Visits

When I visit the prison, I can’t help but compare this ragged group of criminals to the people I deal with outside the razor wire. If prison is the place where one cannot lie to oneself, the world outside...

Liturgy and Literature

Traditional liturgy, through its ceremony and ability to effect a sense of the transcendent, opens the human heart and mind not only to truth, but to other realms of being. If liturgy accomplishes this, so does literature, for what does a good story or a good drama...

Why You Should Read Church History

A good reason for reading church history is that it gives one hope, helping one navigate the stormy waters of yesterday’s news with a calm hand on the tiller. And not only does it put present turmoil into perspective, but it helps one realize that things have...

The Power of Pilgrimage

There is within the human heart the need to set out on pilgrimage as if there is a power unlocked in the journey. There is a sense of seeking and finding—that through one’s visit to the holy places there will be growth in grace, enlightenment, and new...

The Sirens of Certainty

The sirens tempted unwary sailors towards the rocks with their enchanting song and alluring loveliness. They often stand for the lusts of the flesh, but their destructive allure perhaps more powerfully stands for the seductive enchantment of primitivism,...

T.S. Eliot’s Magical Journey

Through T.S. Eliot’s use of symbolism in "The Journey of the Magi" there is a call to a world beyond words—just as the mystics of historic Christianity beckoned to Eliot from the beginning of his journey... 

The Underground Shakespeare

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...

Under the Watchful Sky

Good fiction deals with powerful themes and does so by embedding them in the plot line and character arc—so the word becomes flesh. This is the power of great drama and fiction: that we get caught up in the story and the emotion opens our heart, and...

The Authenticity of Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”

Clint Eastwood made his name with a squint, a glare, a snarl, and a few well-chosen one-liners. His vigilante loner has served him well in films from the spaghetti Westerns, the Dirty Harry franchise, Unforgiven, Pale Rider, and more.

God’s Gamble: Gethsemane, Free Will, & the Fate of Man

Did God gamble everything in the Garden of Gethsemane, the second Adam facing a real, existential, and eternal choice of going through with the Father’s will or backing away from it? God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of  Crucified Love, by Gil Bailie (384...

The Return of Storytelling in a Digital Age

Podcast stories, like reading, have the advantage of engaging the audience’s imagination. And lest the technophobes among us decry the dominance of gadgets, rather than the gadgetry taking us into a brave new world, the technology is actually allowing us to participate in a much older form of literature:...

Two Kinds of Jesuits

Whereas heroic missionary effort and martyrdom seemed the hallmark of the first Jesuits, the second generation moved in a different direction... In the Roman calendar, October is a harvest for militant saints. Kicking off with Saint Therese of Lisieux...