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 [...]
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 pages, Angelico Press, 2016) Few thinkers have stormed the post modern [...]
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: storytelling… Some time ago, on [...]
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 who proclaimed, “Sanctity! It must be won at the point of a sword!”, the calendar marches [...]
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... A friend once commented about Christian films, “For ‘Christian’ read ‘inferior’.” His critique was all [...]
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, truth, and goodness for their own sake... True [...]
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 intelligent life has developed. Given the vast amount of [...]
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 capitulation to the forces of evil... Among C.S.Lewis’ [...]
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 enlightening? A Bloody Habit by Eleanor Bourg [...]