Martin Scorsese is a master filmmaker. Believing a film can be an art form on a level with music, dance, and literature, the one-time seminarian director wrestles with themes of free will and the unforeseen consequences of sin in his latest work, “The Irishman.” Martin Scorsese recently criticized Hollywood’s current cash cow—the comic book [...]
What hath Shakespeare to do with the politics of regime change? Given the long and unsuccessful history of what we call regime change, from the installment of the Shah over Persia, to the Bay of Pigs, to Libya, one questions the sanity of anyone who routinely calls for “regime change.” Yet long before our [...]
“Red Metal” fully understands that we live in a post-Communist world, a world of fundamentalisms as well as of nation-states and tenuous alliances. I highly recommend the novel, not only for its entertainment value, but also for its ability to ask all the right questions we Americans need to be asking. Red Metal, by [...]
Teaching at a time when civilization is in such obvious disarray and such marked decline imposes even more stringent and pressing obligations on the teacher. I have reached the conclusion that what American teachers must do is really very basic: Teach young men and women how to read and write, how to imagine beyond [...]
The contemporary frequency of parents, especially mothers, killing their children—not only newborn babies but toddlers too—is a new phenomenon. Does this have something to do with the relentless loosening of abortion laws in America since Roe v. Wade? We live in an era where we pretend that we do not know when life begins, [...]
My progressive friends assure me that they are looking out for children, minorities, and especially minority children. The problem with this conceit is that when it comes to closing the achievement gap between Latino and white children on the one hand, and black and white children on the other, the only progressive cities are [...]
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is an intense poem, a passionate poem, an erotic poem. From the visual imagery to the very descriptive language Milton uses to portray his lively scenes to us, there is no escaping the reality of the life force that moves his poem. Why, however, did Milton choose to write such [...]
An interesting thing—somewhat alarming, always surprising—happens at Wyoming Catholic College and probably at other small, strongly Catholic colleges like ours. A number of students express dislike, even disdain, for politics. We have noticed it for years. They don’t see what contemporary events have to do with real education. […]
In the late 1950s, as Russell Kirk considered what needed to be conserved in the Western tradition as well as what needed to be discarded, he lamented that much of what the West did was “uglify.” It had forgotten not only the necessity of beauty, but it had forgotten how to define beauty. It [...]
Glenn Arbery, in “Bearings and Distances,” uses bizarre humor, well-drawn characters, a wider landscape, and unexpected twists to expand the reach of Southern Gothic to critique more widespread contagions of modernity: the superficiality of academia, the hypocrisy of conventional religion, the sour legacy of slavery, the suffocating spiral of promiscuity, and the terror of [...]
As this year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, I’ve been inspired to muse upon his oeuvre and to ask myself which of his many works could be considered the best. It is, however, necessary to say upfront that there are two kinds of “best.” There is the objective “best” and the [...]
The Christian Church’s ongoing struggle with modernity is unavoidable. How does a two-thousand-year-old religion, with roots even further into antiquity, adapt to a world not only technologically astonishing, but philosophically post-Christian, totally materialistic, and indifferent towards God? George Weigel answers this question in “The Irony of Modern Catholic History.” The Irony of Modern Catholic [...]
T.S. Eliot’s correspondence with Emily Hale was recently opened, having been kept in Princeton archives until fifty years after Miss Hale’s death. Also opened was Eliot’s response to the archives. It seemed that the poet’s ghost had returned for one last lover’s quarrel with the ghost of his first love, over a century after [...]
Paul Elmer More offered one of the single best critiques of Friedrich Nietzsche, delving deeply into the essence of his thought, in both attraction and repulsion, finding that it is in the attempt to reconcile the love and apprehension about Nietzsche that best allows one to understand him. “Who has ever been concerned for [...]