Thirty-five years ago, family and friends filed into Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills, California, for a funeral Mass. After suffering a stroke and battling pneumonia, Charles Dawson Butler had died of a heart attack at age seventy-one. His colleagues served as pall bearers, and interment was at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. According [...]
Seventy years ago, in April, 1953, Ian Fleming published his first book, a novel called Casino Royale. In it he introduced James Bond, a character that has become as enduring a figure in popular culture as Sherlock Holmes. Despite Fleming’s fourteen Bond books, probably most people know Bond from the twenty-seven theatrical movies about him that [...]
A common misconception is to equate the words “monastic” and “medieval,” and modern people tend to be surprised to learn that Catholic monks still exist and that they no longer live like the collection of circus freaks in The Name of the Rose. However, a few folks have read The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton [...]
During Lent, much of the emphasis concentrates on a metaphorical sojourn in the desert. Liturgical and devotional readings help place Christians alongside Jesus during His forty days of temptation in the wilderness. However, that time of testing is also a time of training, preparing for the greater travail and ultimate triumph marked by the sacred Triduum. [...]
It is worth noticing that Pope Benedict XVI died on Saint Sylvester’s Day. In German-speaking lands, it remains a custom for pastors to deliver a Silvesterpredigt, a sermon on Saint Sylvester’s Day that reflects on the old year and the new. One of Father Joseph Ratzinger’s Saint Sylvester’s Day reflections, “Meditation for New Year’s Eve,” appeared [...]
Of Michael Novak, no less an authority than George Weigel wrote, “Novak’s voluminous and often translated writings touch on virtually every aspect of the American experiment,” while playing “a seminal role in shaping neoconservative thought and bringing it to a wider audience.” Novak (1933-2017) was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and, as Weigel attested, became an influential [...]
Has anyone noticed that the woman is completely delusional? Apparently, Muriel Spark meant her fictional teacher Miss Jean Brodie to be an endearing yet tragic figure, but a character so ridiculously self-important would try anyone’s patience. “I am in my prime,” Brodie tells her students, all girls beginning adolescence, and explains, “You are benefiting by my [...]
In 1997, at the funeral of Princess Diana, and in 2021, at that of Prince Philip, the music included Sir Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod,” one of his Enigma Variations. Elgar composed it around 1898, and it has featured at numerous other funerals and at Britain’s annual Service of Remembrance held on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to [...]
In the film Gods and Monsters (1998), the character James Whale describes actor Boris Karloff as “the dullest fellow imaginable.” Historically, Whale directed Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), making a struggling stage actor a movie star. In Gods and Monsters Whale comes across as a sadly self-absorbed figure, but by all [...]
At the time, of course, there was no way I could appreciate that we were living in something of a time warp, since a lot of what we were doing was about as out of date as a steam locomotive or a Model T. Maybe ten miles from our 1960s ranch-style house was where my parents [...]
