Unfallen Joy and the Tragedy of Love: “Waterloo Bridge”
The 1940 MGM adaptation of Waterloo Bridge is one of my favorite films. It stars Vivien Leigh, in the wake of her Gone With the Wind fame,…
Saint Jane Austen
Among the realist tradition of writing, I must profess a great fondness for Russian realism. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak strike me as having produced a great corpus…
Jonathan Edwards and the Re-Enchantment of the Saeculum: The Puritan and Edwardsian Roots of the Idea of Social Progress
Jonathan Edwards has been called “the American Augustine.”[1] From the threads of introspective piety to the Edwardsian conception of aesthetics, there are strong influences and inheritances from…
The Fall of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine
Plotinus was the last great Hellenic philosopher active during the rise of Christianity just as Christianity was just beginning to supersede the pagan Hellenic world. It remains…
The Geopolitics of American Reaction
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States in 2016 was the culmination of a long history of geopolitical factionalism and resentment that…
Reading Homer from Here to Eternity
“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” That famous protest chant at Stanford University was the manifestation of, admittedly, a long deconstructive project aiming…
Walter Benjamin’s Folly
Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism. Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Walter Benjamin was one of the…
Love and Sacrificial Salvation: The Hidden Theology of Science Fiction Filmography
The Enlightenment mythology usually goes something like this: Humans had been wallowing in darkness and superstition for a long time, then, sometime in the seventeenth century, a…
Plato’s Crito and the Crisis of Sovereignty
The common reading of the Crito asserts that the dialogue examines the nature of just and unjust laws with contingent concerns for how a person should respond…
The Geopolitical Law of Nature in Thucydides
Thucydides is generally not considered a philosopher in the sense that Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle are. David Bolotin, for instance, said, “[Thucydides] is not generally thought of…
The Thomistic Roots of Vatican II Humanism
Apart from the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council is arguably one of the most consequential ecumenical councils in the history…
The Fall and Degeneration of Man in “Gulliver’s Travels”
On October 28, 1726, the book known today as Gulliver’s Travels was published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. A mock work of travel literature,…
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace: The Odyssey of Love
As Prince Andrei lay dying beside Natasha and his sister, Princess Marya, he reflects inward, “Love? What is love?”[1] Love is the theme of all great literature,…
An Annunciation on the Battlefield
On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte achieved his most spectacular victory at the Battle of Austerlitz against an allied army of Russians and Austrians…
Family, Love, and Tragedy in “The Godfather”
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola is rightly considered a masterpiece…