Category: Literature
Seeing the Christmas story through the eyes of The Grumpy Old Ox
In the Gospel of Luke, Christians learn from an early age that Jesus was born in a stable and...
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Unexpected: A Purgatorio in Quatrains
Perfection yet to be attained,
With layers left to be unfurled,
Her soul is cleansed while still detained,
Within the timeless Netherworld.
This state between eternity
And time, however short or long,
Endures between ubiquity
And place to keep a ghostly throng.
Avoiding the Widening Gyre of Our Times — A Nativity Reflection
Let us not get caught up in the widening gyre. Let us not stumble.
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Safranski’s Biography of Goethe: A Genius, Warts and All
‘Goethe: Life As a Work of Art’ may be the best way to learn about the life of the misguided but undeniably great Goethe.
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A New Translation of “Beowulf” Challenges Its Christian Meaning
Stephen Mitchell is a gifted translator, and his translation of Beowulf in verse is meticulous, lucid, musical, and most readable, but is a poor guide to its meaning.
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Pagan Ritual and Polish Nationalism: Adam Mickiewicz’s Play “Forefathers’ Eve”
Everywhere I traveled in Poland, I encountered a reverence for God and Christ, a faithfulness to the teachings of the Catholic Church, that superseded any excessively nationalistic spirit and love of country.
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J. R. R. Tolkien: Great or Second-Rate?
Recently, Roger Scruton, commenting in passing on the Lord of the Rings, called it “second-rate.”
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Charles III: Shakespeare For Dummies
For me, Mike Bartlett’s play “Charles III” sinks of its own cleverness and drowns in a flood of clichés.
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And What About Papal Primacy? – Robert Hugh Benson’s The Religion of the Plain Man
Robert Hugh Benson’s The Religion of the Plain Man is a concise, thoughtful, gracious, persuasive, and beautifully written account of a convert’s journey and the reasons why one might wish to enter into communion with the Catholic Church.
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T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: The Terror of Love
In these two hymn, readers will meet a poet who, though he may not be exactly easy, presents images of beauty and, in his own words, “terror” that are the very stuff of the Christian walk that Eliot himself began in 1927.
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No Place on Earth Is Home for the Christian
My mother, unlike me, always knew her home. She carried it in her heart wherever we lived before we moved to the small town across the river from the city where she was born.
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Not Only for Monks: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Monastic Sermons
The river of life’s pleasures dries up, Bernard tells us, but not the river of abundance that flows from God: For in truth the expectation of the just is not something joyful, but joy itself.
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