Shakespeare and the Good Life
William Shakespeare is the immortal bard of the English language, the great dramatist of the human soul on the human stage. Shakespeare is recorded as having been…
East of Appomattox: Where Old Times Are Still Not Forgotten
One of the great joys of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee is that when I am out hiking the mountainous landscape of the Appalachian and…
Passion and Exodus
Throughout the Christian world, except in Germanic-language countries, Easter is known as Passover. The Passover, of course, is a Jewish holy festival—it marks the deliverance of the…
Botticelli’s Renaissance
What is the Renaissance? Everyone has heard of the term, but few seem to understand what it was. To some, the Renaissance marks the turning away from…
The Almost-Chosen President
Abraham Lincoln is America’s greatest and most important president. Although a contrarian might like to assert George Washington, himself a great president, the honest reality is that…
The Odyssey of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine
We who live today take for granted the notion that Odysseus was a noble figure, a sort of archetype for the soul’s yearning for home. This hasn’t…
Hemingway and Me: Or How I Learned to Love Hemingway and Stop Worrying About His Hopelessness
I did not always like Ernest Hemingway. In some ways I still don’t. Among the post-Great War American writers, I consider F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck…
The Spiritual Architecture of Handel’s “Messiah”
George Frederic Handel is one of the most recognizable names in classical music, even if most people only know his name for the Hallelujah Chorus of “Messiah.”…
Singing Christmas with Rankin/Bass
Growing up, the 25 Days of Christmas on ABC Family was an essential part of the Christmas holiday. Among my favorite films that were often shown were…
The Uses of Spiritual Memory
Does art and literature matter? In our age of vandalism and philistinism, it seems not. Activism in the name of the latest leftwing fad, “decolonizing” art and…
To Kill the King
On a chilly January afternoon, King Charles I appeared before the black-draped scaffold that had been hastily constructed just for him. The King of England who had…
Editor’s Commentary
Like many of you, the October 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas terrorist shocked me and much of the world. Having resided in Jerusalem for a brief…
What Did Saint Ignatius of Antioch Really Believe About the Eucharist?
It is commonplace, even among most non-Catholic Christians, to read Saint Ignatius as affirming “sacramental realism” in his writings. When I was at Yale, this was the…
A Tale of Two Revolutionaries
I recall being somewhat bored reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in my AP English class in high school the first time I read that great work,…
Dreams of Jerusalem
Like most Americans, my first encounter with Jerusalem was reading about it in the Bible. It was the capital city of David’s Israel, the city where the…