Any discussion of Christmas and literature brings to mind instantly the miserly figure of Scrooge and the ghosts in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. It is not likely, however, that such a discussion would bring to mind the medieval classic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Yet this epic of the Middle Ages, written by an anonymous [...]
The man in the shop was very old and broken. When I put down the money, he pushed it feebly away. “No, no,” he said vaguely. “I never have. We are rather old-fashioned here.” “Good heavens!” I said. “What can you mean? Why, you might be Father Christmas.” “I am Father Christmas,” he said apologetically. [...]
As one who has admired Hilaire Belloc for almost half a century, it is gratifying indeed to see such a revival of interest in this great and under-appreciated man of genius. For too long, he has walked in G.K. Chesterton’s shadow. Now, at last, he is emerging in his own right, basking in the light [...]
Yes, we must fight and struggle for the ideal, but in the end the ultimate answers lie in God’s atonement and love for us, and in our love and forgiveness for others who are just as implicated as we are. Wendell Berry is a bearer of that message in his books. I have a great [...]
The contrast between heaven and earth is one of the most pervasive concepts in religious language, a commonplace so common that we rarely stop to think about its meaning. What does it mean, in mythopoetic terms and in literal terms? To put it plainly, what is heaven and what is earth? I was blessed to [...]
All nations need reminders that even their best ideals, though worth defending, do not earn them chosen nation status. Reading C.S. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength” and Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” in light of each other could rouse those in need of both a restoration of confidence in the goodness of the American [...]
C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity” is a model work in the muddled and subjective world of ideologies, state-led terrorisms, gulags, holocausts, and killing fields. Sprinkled with timeless wisdom and profound insights, it is about fundamental aspects of Christianity and seeks to go beyond denominational differences without creating yet another new denomination. After C.S. Lewis converted to [...]
Reading "The Screwtape Letters" can be a creepy and unsettling experience because C.S. Lewis does not merely take us into the head of the human who is experiencing temptation, but into the malevolent mind of the devil himself. This same psycho-dramatic technique is employed by the directors of the recently released horror film, "Nefarious," in [...]
Much as Evelyn Waugh insisted that the theme of "Brideshead Revisited" was “the operation of divine grace”, J.R.R. Tolkien insisted in a letter to a friend that “'The Lord of the Rings' is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” In the fourth and final essay in this survey of liturgy and literature we [...]
One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of [...]
We are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it. [...]
Christopher Dawson set himself the task of surveying the history of Western Civilization in the light of a master-idea: that religion is the dynamic force, the basic constituent and the inspiration of all higher human activity, and that therefore the culture of an era depends upon its religion. Looking back over the vast ruins and [...]
Arguably one of the finest stories in the Western Tradition, “Beowulf” concerns the advent of a hero and his timely end. Throughout, questions of fate, free will, good, and evil predominate. Most prominent, though, are the theological questions of will and grace, one pagan and the other Christian. In 1926, when merely a thirty-four year [...]
The romanticism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s great saga was inspired partly by the actions of King Jan Sobieski during the Battle of Vienna in 1683, when Christian Europe stemmed the advance of militant Islam. A minor observation in a recent essay began a series of connections that will please Catholics, conservatives, history hounds, and J.R.R. Tolkien [...]