Continuing my habit of sharing snippets from my e-mail correspondence that I hope will be of interest, I thought I’d share my response to a correspondent who is currently reading The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde.

The correspondent wrote that he was “trying to think how to summarize my reaction thus far. I think it is this: I feel sorry for him and want to smack him in the head.”

And here’s my response:

I think that feeling sorry for Wilde and desiring to smack him in the head is a reasonable reaction—as long as it’s combined with prayer for Wilde’s soul and for all those wild souls who continue to follow his destructive path. I wrote the book as a reaction against the efforts by homosexuals and postmoderns to claim Wilde as a homosexual martyr. He was nothing of the sort. In the end he was a repentant sinner who came home to his life long love—the Church. He is a prodigal son.