Dwight Longenecker

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...

Our Own American Genocide: “Gosnell,” the Movie

While Gosnell tells the true story of a squalid, back-street abortion mill, we are also reminded by the film that the majority of baby murders are committed legally by nice, middle-class people who are well-connected, well-off, well-educated, well-spoken, and well-funded...

The Coen Brothers’ “True Grit”: Little Girls, Outrageous Outcasts, & Romantic Fools

The Coen brothers' heroes in True Grit are wacky anti-heroes, representing the common man against the establishment elite, the ordinary man in the face of outlandish wickedness. As such, they inspire every outsider who longs for greatness, every outcast who has a heart of genius, and every romantic fool who loves beauty,...

Aliens, Elephants, and Angels

Some time ago while wasting time I came across a seemingly profound, but ultimately silly discussion which is prevalent within popular culture. It’s called the Fermi Paradox, and it goes like this: “There are billions of stars out there like the sun. Therefore, statistically there must be billions of planets like earth where...

C.S. Lewis and the Lavender Inner Ring

Inner Rings exist in the institutions of every human endeavor, and the desire to belong leads the individual not at first to some great wickedness, but to the incremental compromise of truth and goodness required in order to be accepted by the insiders—leading, at last, to complete...

“A Bloody Habit”: The Story of a Vampire-Slaying Priest

Where are the Flannery O’Connors and Evelyn Waughs of our day, who can be witty about wickedness and plant their theology in the thicket of character, the turns of a plot, and the twist of a knife? Where are the writers who can be both entertaining and...

Opting for Saint Benedict in an Ordinary Parish

Like Saint Benedict we’re not trying to change the whole world. We’re simply doing what we can with what we have where we are... I first encountered Saint Benedict while I was a student at Oxford. I...

Black & White, But Gray All Over: Two Films by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s morality tales are complex, subtle, and intricate. They horrify us not only in the puzzle of solving the crime, but in the more profound puzzle of good and evil, death and damnation, life and love, sin and salvation...