Rodney Delasanta

If you are old enough to have taken a Western Civilization course when it was still a staple of the curriculum, one of the first items that confronted you in the freshman syllabus was the familiar story of the Garden of Eden from Genesis. You saw it again at the summit of Dante’s Purgatorio and . . . . Continue Reading »

Saint David,” his friends in Scotland and England called David Hume. And in France, where he spent some years as secretary in the British Embassy during the reign of Louis XV, he was called “le bon David.” It is easy to understand why. When Jean Jacques Rousseau alienated friends and critics . . . . Continue Reading »

Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote. Had she composed a longer poem or lived a longer life, would she have come to agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “God’s Grandeur,” that “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”? Or . . . . Continue Reading »

Those of us who thought we were well informed about 1054 and all that were stung by the viscerally hostile reaction of many Orthodox Christians to John Paul II’s recent Pauline pilgrimage to Greece, Syria, and Malta. Whereas ecumenism in the West seems to have succeeded in muting anti-papal . . . . Continue Reading »