A great man died last week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and we need to think about how to honor and remember him. Otherwise, he will fade into history as a great figure of the twentieth century who played a major role¯along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II¯in . . . . Continue Reading »
If you took an opinion poll, you’d probably find that the large majority of America’s Latin professors are fairly standard-issue liberals, politically indistinguishable from the rest of the nation’s academics. But, somewhere along the line, the public praise of Latin seems to have . . . . Continue Reading »
I mentioned here before Bishop Eusebius (260¯339), who is often called the father of Church history, and wrote about the conjunction of Church and Empire in a manner that is today frequently dismissed as “triumphalistic.” Even in his own time, Eusebius’ hyper-confident reading of . . . . Continue Reading »
This will, in due course, become a book, tentatively titled American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile . The subject is living an authentically Christian life between the “now” of Christ’s victory and the “not yet” of a promised Kingdom delayed. The “not yet” . . . . Continue Reading »
“Can everything around here be got?” oil man Daniel Plainview asks. “Sure” is the reply. And so There Will Be Blood , roughly adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil ! and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights ), begins to gush¯rage and sweat and blood.There . . . . Continue Reading »
At the climax of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , R.P. McMurphy, the irascible antihero who believed time in a madhouse was preferable to time in the Big House, has succeeded in making life miserable for a psychiatric hospital’s staff and tolerable for its inmates. . . . . Continue Reading »
Oh for the days of the old Hollywood Production Code, when men were men, women were ladies, and sociopaths weren’t always the coolest guys in the room. You remember the Production Code: that system of dos and don’ts more or less agreed upon by moral watchdogs and studio heads to ensure . . . . Continue Reading »
Reports last month told of a meeting of some ninety prominent evangelical leaders deciding to support John McCain for president. While noting disagreements between themselves and McCain, the group concluded that McCain shared their most important views, on life and marriage. Matthew Staver, the . . . . Continue Reading »
In April 2006, I published Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History ¯a book that, in the pages of First Things , Michael Uhlmann called the “definitive work” that utterly discredited the history in Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade . Dispelling the Myths of . . . . Continue Reading »
“Happiness in this life is irrelevant,” Lady Marchmain (as played by Emma Thompson) tells the unbeliever Charles Ryder (played by Matthew Goode from Match Point ) in the recently released film version of Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated novel, Brideshead Revisited . “The only thing that . . . . Continue Reading »
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