I just finished a very fast read-through (with permission to skip some sections) of Louis Menand's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It's a 500-page book about one school of American philosophy. I picked it up used and have had it on the shelf for a few years, waiting until my teaching duties called for me to brush up on pragma...
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Spoiler alert: I will be talking about plot in this review, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie, or unless you don’t plan on seeing it anyway!
Every year on Christmas Eve I enjoy attending a worship service at my church, and then my whole extended family (uncles, aunts, cousins, and kids) gets together for a big family dinner with a white elephant gift e...
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Think the Western Church is Jan Crouch or Borgia Popes?
Believe that English Protestantism is Oliver Cromwell tyranny in service of the cultural values of Elmer Gantry?
Read Spenser and take the cure.
The notion that Protestantism, at least of sort, destroys the ability to produce great literature should be refuted by the mere existence of Milton, but Edmund Spense...
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The Rolling Stones have a famous song called “Sympathy for the Devil.” I think it may be an apropos title for John Milton’s Paradise Lost. English poet William Blake, who admired but disagreed with Milton, famously said that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In other words, Blake thought that Milton so humanized Satan in his...
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Today (October 27) is the birthday of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, known simply as Erasmus, famous in his own time as Mr. Renaissance. He was "born to bring back literature," his contemporaries said of him: ad restituendas literas natus.
The Renaissance was a defining event in Western intellectual history, precisely because it looked back into antiquity for inspiration....
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As argued by Miguel Asín Palacios, the Europe in which Dante emerged to create his Divine Comedy was steeped in Islamic materials or in materials that came through Islamic or Islamized channels. Dante’s eschatology owed its inspiration to Islamic eschatology, and Dante knew many Latin translations of Arabic writings. The whole allegorical structure of the Divine Comedy, with...
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Two sisters sit at home, talking. The younger sister does needlework and arranges flowers picked from the garden, as she passes the time until her boyfriend comes to visit.
The older sister, on the other hand, is trying to make some kind of sense out of her wasted life, having an emotional crisis brought on by yesterday's reading of the Iliad.
"Old Homer leaves a sting,...
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Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who lived his last decades in California, was born on this day, June 30, in 1911.
I am told on good authority that we should pronounce his name "Chess-wov Mee-woash," but I can't get used to saying those L's as W's, so now I stumble over his name whenever I have to say it out loud. That's probably appropriate, because so much of his poetry is ...
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning died on this day, June 29, in 1861. She was the most famous female poet of the Victorian age, easily outpacing other luminaries like Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow (who?). During her lifetime, the rumor was that she only missed the post of poet laureate because that Tennyson fellow was an unstoppable candidate.
Barrett Browning's greatest hits...
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Featured Essay
“Sing, O Muse, of Gollum, of Mr. Tumnus, of Pantalaimon, of the Dementors, of the elfstones, of the black cauldron, of the Old Ones, and of the Aes Sedai”!
What would Homer and Virgil have thought of that?
The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001-03) was such a success for New Line Cinema that it spawned a whole host of other British fantasy novel-based movies such as ...
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On the birthday of G. K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874), here are my three favorites from among his many poems.
One for the not yet born, one for those of us making our ways through the everyday, and one for the very old.
By The Babe Unborn
If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,
If a ...
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Spoiler alert: I will be talking about plot in this review, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie, or unless you don’t plan on seeing it anyway!
I just went to see the movie “Angels & Demons” (released Friday, May 15, 2009) and thought it was much better than its predecessor, “The Da Vinci Code.” Not to confuse the point, but actually “Angels”...
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