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Beethoven and the Spirit of Christmas
Every time I hear the music of Beethoven, the spirit of Christmas touches my heart. Because Beethoven is bound up with love, Beethoven is bound up with Christ. During Advent, Christians everywhere are...
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Innocence Lost: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Literature
In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and...
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The Pilgrim’s Calling: John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”
John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” contains a shift away from institutional idealism and toward a separationist theology that revived the Theology of Calling. It is perhaps the finest work of...
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Decadence, Love, & Lust: Understanding the “Star Wars” Prequels
The original “Star Wars” trilogy explored the crises of identity, love, and redemption in the midst of a technologically tyrannical world. The prequel trilogy, by contrast, is primarily concerned with...
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Antigone Agonistes
It is undoubtedly true that our first and primary loyalty is the love due to family rather than the state. Even if it brings death, the choice of love rather than power is the most heroic thing a...
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The Incarnation of Truth and Love
The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or...
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The Enchanted Cosmos With Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the...
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Metamorphosis by Love
Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is many things: several stories, some bleak, some uplifting, ranging from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Yet in its most fundamental form, his...
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Eating Alone: Aristotle & the Culture of the Meal
Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the...
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In the Ruins of Babylon: The Poetic “Genius” of John Keats
The poetry of John Keats is a window into the mad genius of the Romantics: their lusts and hopes; their ambitions and ignorance; their radicalism and fantasies. In reading Keats, one is simultaneously...
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Baseball and the Cure of Souls
Baseball has an essence that mirrors the heavenly city and the precision of creation better than other sports. Its calmer nature also embodies that sense of tranquility which the restless heart seeks....
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Augustine’s “City of God”: The First Culture War
In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for...
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Memory, Love, & Eternity in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” wrestles with the death of the poet’s closest friend, a death that pushed Tennyson into a bout of depression and an immense wallowing sorrow. But the poem is also an attempt...
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The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen”
Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to...
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