In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton writes about devil worship. He says that when pagans get serious about their imaginary deities, they turn to "diabolism". There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. Or, that the devil really keeps his [...]
The Forest of Suicides in Dante's Inferno Dante groups into one of his deep circles of hell two types of sinners - suicides (those who took their own lives) and squanderers (those who wasted their resources). These are both guilty, according to Virgil, of sins "against self". One of the squanderers Dante meets was a man, [...]
A friend of mine gave me a CD to listen to while driving. It was a recording of speeches made at a conference at Clear Creek on John Senior and the Integrated Humanities Program at KU, a program that made so many Catholic converts over the years. One of the presenters made an interesting comment. He said [...]
In my last post I wrote about Dante and "Custody of the Eyes", particularly how Dante's genuine mature purity gives the lie to the faux mature purity of those who think the rules don't apply to them. And just now I came upon this insightful paragraph by Stephen Zelnick in the Ignatius Press Critical Romeo and Juliet - (emphasis [...]
One of the more ridiculous blog battles last liturgical year was the Christopher West inspired claim that those of so-called "mature purity" need not practise "custody of the eyes". "Custody of the Eyes", for those who don't know, is the simple and humble practise of not gazing upon objects that would excite our passions to sin. In [...]
There's this thing in Hollywood called a Script Doctor. This Script Doctor is a paid professional who takes your screenplay, and regardless of how literary or well done it is, charges you tens of thousands, nay even hundreds of thousands of dollars, to make it into a hackneyed formula piece. The Script Doctor and his Snake [...]
Tonight Credo of the Catholic Laity (with the help of my friend and Theater of the Word chaplain Fr. Brian Harrison) brought in a fascinating speaker, Professor Robert P. George of Princeton, who gave a detailed talk on the challenges facing Catholics, Evangelicals, Eastern Orthodox, and other serious Christians - as well as devout Jews and Muslims - challenges [...]
The voice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy - that is, to reality. Thus speaks George MacDonald to the narrator [...]
Yesterday we saw the movie Lincoln, which is very good. It's all about Lincoln's struggle, during the final months of his life, to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed - to abolish slavery. Without the abolition of slavery, the Civil War would have been a great exercise in futility. And despite what the revisionists have tried to [...]
We've just seen one of the best documentaries ever, Brooklyn Castle , the story of a middle school in Brooklyn, its incredible chess team, and the amazing poor kids and their families that populate the story. The movie made me realize the ease with which we suburbanites forget about or even look down upon inner city families and their [...]
