Between December, 2007, and June, 2017, Model Railroader magazine has featured rock and roll legend Rod Stewart. Since December, 2010, those features have been cover stories, the magazine falling open at the centerfold to reveal stunning photographs of his model railroad. In his autobiography, Rod (2012), he subtitled his chapter on model railroading “In which [...]
It is fitting that a day in late April, 2017, marked by alternating sunshine and thunderstorms should see Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in C Minor. From the first shimmering notes to the final crescendo, it was a triumph. The setting for this performance was the basilica of [...]
More than thirty years ago in History Today, Paul Preston wrote, “Opera and history are inextricably intertwined,” adding that, “It is as impossible to understand Verdi without a sense of the Risorgimento as it is to understand the Risorgimento without listening to early Verdi.” Studying the nineteenth-century campaign for Italian unification without understanding the role played [...]
Every three years the Gospel for the Fifth Sunday of Lent is the well-known story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-44). Center stage stand his sisters, Martha and Mary, and since the late sixth century and the writings of Saint Gregory the Great, Christians have seen them as representing the active and the contemplative lives. [...]
At nearly every Christian monastery and convent is a bulletin board on which monks and nuns post prayer requests. Those requests come to the religious community every day, often through friends or relatives of the religious or in the mail from complete strangers. The latter are often anonymous, and the envelopes are addressed simply to the [...]
Whenever people lament, “Society is becoming more pagan,” they are in fact worried about current hedonists, folks whose biggest regret is having missed out on Woodstock. People fretting about pseudo-pagans forget that ancient pagans believed in duty, in natural law, in the family, in gods that inspire prayer and require sacrifice, and in a society that [...]
Two chapters, 12 and 17, of J. R. R. Tolkien’s posthumously published creation epic about Middle Earth, The Silmarillion (1977), focus on humans. “The first Sun arose in the West,” said Tolkien in Chapter 12, “and the opening eyes of Men were turned towards it, and their feet as they wandered the Earth for the most [...]
One of the most accessible Christian poets in English would have been 110 this year. John Betjeman (1906-1984), whose journalism and poetry conveyed the sooty red brick atmosphere of mid-twentieth century Britain, was late in his life honored with a knighthood and the title of Poet Laureate. Born into a prosperous manufacturing family in the north [...]
The weather had been scorching, so when the rain came, it frothed across the streets and sidewalks like someone had tipped over a giant beer truck. My shoes echoed wetly down the fake marble tiles of the sixth floor of the bank building on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga, and I heard my heart beating [...]
In one of his finer novels, Sackett (1961), Louis L’Amour has the narrator, William Tell Sackett, observe, “A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.” The context was Sackett having seen a grizzly bear “scooping honey out of a hollow tree.” Sackett, Tell to family and friends, saw no threat from [...]
