The perennial moral that Wonder Woman learns is that evil, and the war which is one of its manifestations, can never be finally destroyed in human history… It’s been many years since I’ve been in the habit of watching films. It’s not because I’ve turned my back on the motion picture as an art form; [...]
Star Trek is a modern allegory and mythology for late Western Civilization. The series worked best when Captain Kirk stood for willful impulse; Mr. Spock for aristocratic reason; and Dr. McCoy for democratic passions… The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (St. Martin’s, 2016) As [...]
Ostensibly about the Second World War, Foyle’s War actually concerns the war against the encroaching doom of the modern world… From time to time I am asked, “Father, how do you get so much done? You write books and essays, maintain a blog, run a parish, build a church, lead pilgrimages, and go on speaking tours and [...]
In the murder mystery, the portrayal of an apparent Eden is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored… There’s a wonderful moment in one of the old Inspector Morse shows—the one [...]
As we retreat into our respective corners to enjoy the things we enjoy, we enjoy less and less in common with one another. The bonds that hold us together are loosening… Few things have changed day-to-day American life as much as the free flow of digital entertainment and information from producers to consumers over the [...]
Recently, I went with a group of friends to a concert of American choral music based on black spirituals. At the intermission, my friends and I spoke excitedly about what we experienced. The sole musician amongst us praised the balance of the ensemble and the conductor’s energy. One woman noticed how nervous the lead soprano [...]
Issue one! To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s. For when John yelled “Wronnng” at me from his center chair of “The McLaughlin Group,” it hit with the same familiar finality I had heard, many times, from Jesuits at the front of the [...]
The roaring success of the English television drama Downton Abbey had little to do with the grand house, the sumptuous costumes, the superb cast and intricately intriguing storyline. Having just finished watching the final season, it occurred to me that the series’s success has everything to do with fairytales. […]
In order to explain surprising political phenomena like Donald Trump and Brexit, we have to look at the unprecedented impact of new technologies on our total environment. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, has entertained the thesis that the television age, which brought people together, is over. He opines that [...]
For seventy-five years, Batman has played a significant role in the American mind and in American culture. He is, for all intents and purposes, an American original, equivalent to Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn. He even possesses many of the same qualities of each of these nineteenth-century literary figures. As Bruce Wayne, he is the [...]
The highly rated CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory compensates for its lack of refinement (it has a laugh track!) with its brains. The show began with characters who were more like caricatures of four types of physical scientists: the theoretical physicist (Sheldon Cooper), the experimental physicist (Leonard Hofstadter), the astrophysicist (Raj Koothrappali), and the aerospace engineer [...]
I often wonder what benefit is derived from the obsession so many of us have with cable news. From my observation, the byproducts of watching and listening to the pundit class drone on are anger, mistrust, and, if we are honest, abject hatred for the opposing opinion. All that is offered on these channels are the superficial views of [...]
The London Daily Telegraph recently ran an article in which a young history graduate recounts the political bias that threaded through all ten years of his education. A major module in his degree course—from a top flight university—was about “the ramblings of John Lennon and Yoko Ono”. The prescribed reading-list of Obama presidency critiques focussed [...]
It’s hard to avoid it. Sherlock fever is everywhere, and all across the Internet, American viewers are feverishly keeping up with the Third Season of BBC One’s hit television show, Sherlock. In case you’ve been immune to the virus since 2010, the gist of Sherlock is that it is a thoroughly modern take on Sir Arthur [...]