With a dream, hard work, and real sacrifice, the good Christian people at Bob Jones University have created something beautiful and real. By creating Narnia onstage, they are captivating the imaginations of a new generation of children and sneaking them past the ever-watchful and increasingly dangerous dragons of secular materialism. When I left Bob [...]
What interests me about Hell or High Water are the moral dilemmas. In addition to its being a smart heist movie and an up-to-date Western, it is also a Robin Hood story. The main characters might be robbing banks illegally but they’re stealing from the bankers who first robbed their family legally. The 2016 [...]
Myth connects us to the deepest truths and dynamics of human experience, and it does so through the gift of imagination and catharsis. As we identify with the hero, we experience what he goes through. We share not only his thoughts, but also his emotions. Heart speaks to heart. Some time ago my wife [...]
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 our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Dwight Longenecker as he considers [...]
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 the realm of the Word. Those [...]
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 the razor wire is where it is nearly impossible not to lie to oneself… Go to [...]
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 accomplish, but to take us for a [...]
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 often been bad, but despite all the [...]
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 inspiration… Four years ago my friend Joseph [...]
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, fundamentalism, and restorationism. […]
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… In the summer of 1927, just after his baptism into the (Anglo) Catholic faith, T.S. Eliot wrote “The [...]
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 explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early 1980s she and her husband attended a [...]
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 as our heart is opened so is [...]
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. All these roles are summed up in Walt Kowalski—the main character in the 2008 film Gran Torino [...]