Like the film A Man for All Seasons (1966), Alfred Hitchcock’s film I Confess (1953) shows a good man thrust into a situation where there can be no compromise. Hitchcock (1899-1980) was brought up Catholic, educated at a Jesuit school in London, and he was intrigued by the cinematic potential of I Confess, originally a stage [...]
In Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, we learn that Tolkien was fond of the novels of John Buchan. Like Tolkien, Buchan had formative experiences in South Africa. Tolkien was born there, and Buchan briefly served there as private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner for overseeing reconstruction after the Boer War. Buchan’s most [...]
An advertisement for a new line of pipe tobacco named for Casey Jones calls to mind that controversial American folk-hero. “When most people think of old-time railroading,” wrote Oliver Jensen in 1975, “they think of Casey Jones roaring into eternity with his hand on the whistle cord.” John Luther “Casey” Jones (born 1863) was the only [...]
Fifty years ago, on 14 July, 1966, Pope Paul VI issued an Apostolic Letter, Alma parens, marking the 700th anniversary of the birth of John Duns Scotus. Although Scotus’ argument in favor of belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary influenced Pope Pius IX’s Apostolic Constitution of 1854 defining that dogma, Alma parens was the first [...]
In the late ninth century, in his preface to his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, England’s King Alfred the Great wrote that a king must have the support of men who pray, men who fight, and men who work. He meant the clergy, soldiers, and farmers, merchants, and artisans. Those ideals of faith, fighting, and [...]
Richard M. Weaver, in the Introduction to Ideas Have Consequences (1948), doubted the value of universal literacy. “It is not what people can read,” he said, “it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment.” [...]
An essayist’s governing principle is that more can be said in a thousand words than in a thousand pages. Ten years ago ISI Books published American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, a thousand pages containing 626 entries varying in length from 250 to 2500 words. In that hefty volume comes together the best of both worlds. Time after [...]
Around 1766 a new form of fun began, so 2016 is as good a time as any to commemorate it. While for centuries people with mathematical minds had been amusing themselves with chess and cards, 250 years ago people with more pictorial minds got their turn. By 1766 John Spilsbury, a young printer and map maker [...]
In 1916 Edgar Lee Masters, then forty-eight, published an expanded version of his collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology. Still in print, it consists of 244 short free verse poems, each standing as an epitaph for someone buried in the hillside cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River. Nearly all the poems are in the [...]
With presidential primaries occurring and the incumbent retiring, it is a good time to study a particular presidential speech, one delivered on the 17th of January. A short speech, it took around fifteen minutes for the President to deliver. A part commentators seem to have missed requires close attention: [There] has been the technological revolution [...]
