The typical re-telling of the Christmas story has Joseph, Mary and the donkey arriving in Bethlehem on a cold, winter night looking for a place to stay. All the hotels have “No Vacancy” signs on display because so many people, like Mary and Joseph, have traveled to Bethlehem to register for the census. A grumpy [...]
Gollum and Caliban are not humans who transmogrify temporarily into beasts. They are horrific hybrids: half humans (or hobbits) who have been taken over by the bestial nature of the dark side. While they have become monstrous, their horror is mixed with humanity. J.R.R. Tolkien was famously antipathetic towards Shakespeare, and there is no suggestion [...]
Despite their obscurity, “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis” were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? Shadowplay, by Clare Asquith, 370 pages, PublicAffairs, 2018) 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 [...]
In a world beset by violence, doubt, despair, cynicism and sin to turn to the works of poet Thomas Traherne is to breathe a gust of fresh Spring air. My little sister followed me to England, fell in love with the country, fell in love with an Englishman, and fell in love with the English [...]
John Senior’s great contribution was to forge a middle way between indoctrination and the chaos of complete relativism. Instead of indoctrinating students, the classical knowledge of a Christian culture provided the tools and the framework for true education. John Senior and the Restoration of Realism by Francis Bethel It was one of those serendipitous meetings that [...]
It may be that incorrupt bodies are proof of the possibility that spiritual practice has physical effects. When we understand how the mind and body work together, we may also start to understand why some saintly characters wind up being both dead as a doornail and fresh as a daisy. On All Saints Day we [...]
Rooted in Nietzsche’s idea of the ”Superman” is the idea is that a new breed of humanity will emerge who will be superior to the old, joyless Judeo-Christian ethic. Striding confidently into a brave new world, this new super-humanity will rise above the old humanity groveling before their gods. “I am better than everybody else” [...]
What Peter Anson’s collection of apostolic oddballs teaches us is that to be cut off from the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is to descend into a self-styled fantasy world of religion—a world where the reality is no deeper than the scarlet silk of one’s cape. When I was an undergraduate at Bob Jones [...]
A balanced view does not dismiss the reality of the supernatural, nor does it indulge in curiosity and unhealthy fascination with the unseen world. Instead it understands that the invisible realm—like the angels themselves—is everywhere present. I have in my library a book by two heretics. Matthew Fox is an Episcopal priest who was once [...]
The liturgical imagery of the priest connects directly to our concepts and language about God. It does so because our concepts and language about God are necessarily personal. We are called to be in a person to person relationship with God—a relationship of intentional love, and as human beings we can only relate personally through [...]
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the ways of God more strange and more beautiful than anything the mind of man can fathom. What else could explain Father Dwight Longenecker's journey from undergraduate at Bob Jones University, to Anglican country parson, to Catholic priest for the diocese of Charleston? At the conclusion of the [...]
The prevalent tendency in our society to overestimate individual freedom is wreaking havoc on personal happiness and threatening to bring down Western culture. This culture is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation and it will not survive the dismantling of that foundation. Fr. Longenecker concludes his interview with author and friend of René Girard with a [...]
Father Dwight Longenecker’s account of his own life’s adventure is subtitled “a somewhat religious odyssey”, indicating that his life, like all our lives, is a journey, or a pilgrimage, or a quest, the goal of which is, or should be, to get to heaven. “I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size,” wrote [...]
God was not absent in the darkest corner of Europe during the horrors of World War II, but he was planting the seed in Poland in the combined work of a hidden nun and a dynamic pope, which would burst through the darkness. As we traveled across Poland on a recent parish pilgrimage, we watched [...]