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Seventy years ago, an annual Christmas tradition began, a one-act opera in English, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Less well-known is Menotti’s opera from three Decembers later, a three-act parable suitable also for Easter, The Saint of Bleecker Street. Its plot is simple: Annina, a young woman in New York City’s neighborhood of [...]
Sometimes a little life experience sticks in our memory and we don't know why we still remember it after six or seven decades. I think it might be because the experience is a lesson, like a little parable from God. It stays with us because we are meant to learn something from it, something important. I [...]
Three of the four Gospels tell us that right after John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for forty days of testing by Satan. It seems a far cry from what one might expect from a hand-clapping, alleluia-shouting inspirer like the Holy Spirit: upon the heels of a joyous [...]
I got sucked into a quarrel yesterday. I hate to admit that, but there it is. The only value such an experience has is the self-examination it evokes, not just to determine whether I was truly “right” but more importantly, to determine what made me lose my cool. I raised my voice—something I never do—then realized too late [...]
In this week's Inner Sanctum: Joseph Pearce waxes whimsical on how his wife is promoting the noble tradition of shooting your eye out for Christmas. He also vents his spleen dogmatically on the hierarchical necessity of singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in the correct order, condemning those who place drummers drumming and pipers piping above [...]
(This has nothing whatever to do with Catholic culture.) If you are lucky enough to have a friend who lives in South Georgia and has a pecan tree, you might have received pecans this year for Christmas, and you might have thought, Now what am I supposed to do with this. Well, a word or two [...]
In several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, trains figure prominently. They can play menacing roles, such as in The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) or Shadow of a Doubt (1943), but in two in particular, Strangers on a Train (1951) and North by Northwest (1959), significant scenes occur in a train’s dining car. David Lehman, writing in the April/May, [...]
Psychologists might be best placed to discern why some people seem to derive a pornographic delight in imagining their own generation is the worst of times and is witnessing the End of Civilization. With that self-absorption goes a grandiose fantasy that among the ruins, they will be with the few who emerge to rescue what little [...]