T.S. Eliot and Reconversion on Ash Wednesday
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . There is something telling about man’s tendency to view his life as a journey, for journeys convey…
Eliot’s Muse
“Each of the women in Eliot’s life brought out a facet of the enigma he presented.” Four women were in the public spotlight during Eliot’s life: Vivienne…
Dumpster Diving for T.S. Eliot
Last year I wrote of my experience jumping into a school’s dumpster in order to rescue books that had been thrown out for reasons unknown to me.[1]…
T.S. Eliot and Reconversion on Ash Wednesday
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . There is something telling about man’s tendency to view his life as a journey, for journeys convey…
Fear, Dust, and Water: A Look Into T.S. Eliot’s Poetic Imagery
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us…
T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor
*Note from Editor: Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. I had the privilege of studying with him just prior to his death. January also marks…
Death at Yuletude: T.S. Eliot and “The Journey of the Magi”
There is an idea that the best artists who have converted to Christianity sacrifice their creativity for spiritual relief. Regarding T.S. Eliot’s baptism and confirmation in the…
T.S Eliot’s Christianity and Culture: The Problem of Establishment
T. S. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.[1] Eliot is almost as well known among literate…
T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture
“Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism.[1]…
Visions of the Wasteland – Part II
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) comments that in the Thirteenth-Century Quest of the Holy Grail, the wasteland motif has largely contracted into the figure of the maimed king. The…
Visions of the Wasteland – Part I
Homer bequeaths to posterity one of the earliest visions of a wasteland, anticipating T. S. Eliot by three millennia. Eliot, incidentally, acknowledges his debt to Homer by…
Grace in the Garden: The Fall of Man and the British Pastoral Tradition
“An intermediate nature . . . prevents the universe falling into two separate halves.” —Plato, Symposium (203b). Almost from the beginning of when human beings began to…
T.S. Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon”: Of Memory and Salvation
“These things I do within, in that vast chamber of my memory." From St. Augustine’s Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western…
A People Without History: T.S. Eliot’s Critique of Evolutionary History
While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions…
Blaise Pascal: The Mathematical and the Intuitive Mind
Matters of faith, philosophy, and theology were the center of intellectual debate at the beginning of the modern era. A previous age of traditions and institutions was…