I've been dealing with a challenging situation for the last two weeks, so I have not been posting. Now we appear to be past that, but I've got a major creative project that I hope to finish by Ash Wednesday, so I'm going to keep this post brief - then I plan on bugging my readers [...]
This is from a post on my old blog ... Since I'm currently a judge in a one-act Catholic play writing contest, I don't want to say too much about the plays I'm reading. But I have seen enough to know how to write a really bad play. And I'm passing that advice on to you, dear [...]
It's hard to say what good teachers do. But it's easy to say what bad students don't do. They don't read the material! A few months back, I complained to my friend Ken Colston, a retired teacher, that many of the essay answers I was getting from my Homeschool Connections students were padded, meandering pieces that [...]
I am hoping to book a performance of my play Socrates Meets Jesus (based on the book by Peter Kreeft) in New England this summer, and so I'm posting the video below of our performance of the play at the Chesterton Conference in Massachusetts. Some of my Homeschool Connections students really like this play. For one [...]
Here's my latest piece on the Christian Shakespeare website ... I am thrilled to be conducting acting workshops this summer for the cast of Julius Caesar. This great political tragedy of Shakespeare’s will be performed in September at the Flint Hills Shakespeare Festival in St. Mary’s, Kansas. In preparation, I recently listened to a tremendous audio [...]
Joanna Michal Hoyt, a Quaker who lives at a Catholic Worker Community in upstage New York, has written a very insightful essay on King Lear which I have just published on the Christian Shakespeare website. She examines the play in the light of what she calls the Domination System (power politics) vs. the Beloved Community (the [...]
Here's a reminder that Joseph Pearce's latest television special on JRR Tolkien (featuring yours truly playing the part of Tolkien himself) will air on EWTN at the following times ... Tuesday, May 17 - 03:30 AM Eastern Saturday, May 21 - 11:00 PM Eastern These times might be a bit awkward for many viewers, but rest [...]
This is from Etienne Gilson's Choir of Muses, translated by Maisie Ward. My emphases in bold. *** The writer does not choose, he is chosen. It is another question whether he will have the courage to obey the call, but he has still heard a call even if he rejects it ... He who hears it feels he [...]
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not [...]
The following quotations (with my emphases in bold) are about the effects of "phenomenalism" on our souls, the belief that individual events or details are all that compose reality. Phenomenalism (as used by this author) means that there are no unifying principles of being, no "substances" indicated by the disconnected bits of data we observe. In [...]
