J.R.R. Tolkien believed that the Anglo-Saxon world might offer us strength to redeem Christendom. The hero of “The Lord of the Rings,” after all, is an Anglo-Saxon farmer turned citizen-warrior. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Bradley J. Birzer, as he discusses J.R.R. Tolkien’s christological interpretation [...]
R.R. Reno in “Return of the Strong Gods” argues that we need a return to the pillars that represent classic human values: the home, the country, and the religion. He calls for true patriotism rather than nationalism, marriage and family instead of a sexual free-for-all, and historic Christianity instead of do-it-yourself “spirituality.” Return of [...]
Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is intelligently written, beautifully directed, well-acted, and gripping from the very first scenes. Certainly, it’s a play that demands extended conversation. When I told my wife that I was going to be writing this week about our son Will’s play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, she asked me if [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara J. Elliott, as she recounts the series of events and the stories of the faithful souls that were necessary to bring down the Berlin Wall and communist tyranny in Eastern Europe. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher The Berlin Wall [...]
Socialism did not kill merely the body—it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim man’s oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us [...]
Barbara J. Elliott remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall, and draws attention to the individuals who, through faith and love, made this momentous event possible. Having interviewed many of those who were imprisoned, beaten, ostracized, and forced underground during the rule of the communist regime, Professor Elliott tells with passion the stories of the [...]
The Christian imagination, unlike the imaginations of the Far East or the pagans, calls the mind upward into the vast expanse beyond the stars to meet with God face-to-face. As the eyes are the windows to the soul, so is imagination a highway to God. The imagination is what distinguishes humanity from the rest [...]
Avarice brings to mind the image of a hoarder—one who simply wants things for himself. However, while wanting more of something is certainly one side of avarice, it might not be the most important side. The image that always comes to mind for me when thinking about the vice of greed, or avarice, is [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” must rank as one of the finest short stories of the twentieth century, breath-takingly beautiful, even by the highest Tolkienian standards. As with so many of his writings, “Leaf” takes seriously issues of goodness, free will, destiny, subcreation, and eternity. One very late night or early morning in 1939, [...]
Beowulf was not a revolutionary but a guardian of all that is good and sacred, not a killer in love with blood and the cries of men but a protector of that which is right and proper. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, [...]
Time, it will turn out, is a kind of intuiting, indeed the matrix of all intuiting, but it is not therefore to be intuited, that is, looked at, rather than thought out. The moving pictures that Hegel himself suggests to illustrate the emerging determinations of thought are only concessions to our ordinarily representational minds. This [...]
In her recent speech, Queen Elizabeth began by stating that it was always her Government’s priority to secure the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. What is particularly exciting about this statement is that it recognizes an ancient wisdom, and most neglected subject: subsidiarity. Any reference to the Queen’s Speech might bring to [...]
The essential error of the modernist theologians who pushed their agenda at the Amazonian synod is that they have fallen for the myth of the noble savage. But both the noble savage and the urban savage are simplistic generalities: They express a truth and a lie at the same time. The recent Amazonian synod [...]
It would be no exaggeration to claim that C.S. Lewis’s “Perelandra”—arguably the least read and least remembered part of his “Space Trilogy”—is nothing short of a masterpiece. In it, the author ably blends science fiction and theology, giving us a gripping thriller, steeped in thought, adventure, and myth. In the second of the three [...]