How do we experience life? What is it to be human? How do we see? What is the relationship between reading and history, reading and science, metaphysics…empathy, philosophy, religion and art? …More. — How to Mark a Book by Mortimer Adler — The social disaster: Children who frequently check social media face significant brain changes
18 Nov 2011 The Vatican has reignited the debate over whether playwright William Shakespeare was Catholic by insisting there was ‘little doubt he was’. Historians have been in two minds over Shakespeare’s faith with splits between whether he was a Roman Catholic or a Protestant and the argument has surfaced again with the release of… Read More Vatican: there is ‘little doubt’ William Shakespeare was Catholic
Tolkien Mourned the Decline of the Shire* …the real shire of his youth which he ever remembered and sought to salvage to the extent that he could; the simplicity and beauty of the land and villages which he grew up in, the countryside, the mountains and streams, the beauty of the day and the night… Read More Tolkien’s Battle for the Shire. And for Us All.
Amy Welborn. When Andre Dubus passed away in his Haverhill, Massachusetts home February 25, [1999] obituaries noted the loss of one of America’s finest writers of the short story and certainly one of the most interesting and inspiring figures on the contemporary literary scene. What the secular newspapers failed to emphasize, however, was Dubus’ faith… Read More Andre Dubus 1936-1999
On giving, not just consuming. Melvyn Bragg and guests (In Our Time, BBC) discuss Charles Dickens’ novella, written in 1843 when he was 31, which has become intertwined with his reputation and with Christmas itself. Ebenezer Scrooge is the miserly everyman figure whose joyless obsession with money severs him from society and his own emotions,… Read More Dickens and the meanings of A Christmas Carol
By Joseph Pearce. As mentioned earlier … I was honoured to be asked to write the introduction to the first Spanish edition of the play, Sir Thomas More, which was authored by Shakespeare in collaboration with several other contemporary playwrights. Querying some of the assertions that I made in that introduction, a Spanish correspondence wrote to… Read More Shakespeare, Thomas More, and Henry VIII
The gifted Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, by any standard, was a most extraordinary person. Donald DeMarcoNational Catholic Register February 23, 2022 Sigrid Undset walked into the manager’s office of the Aschehoug publishing company, one of the largest in Norway, and tossed G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) onto his desk, exclaiming that “this is the… Read More Sigrid Undset — A Catholic Woman for Our Time
You know you have to read “between the lines” to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind… Read More How to Mark a Book By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
Authority and Freedom:A Defense of the Arts–by jed perlknopf, 176 pages, $20. First Things Magazine In the slim volume Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, the longtime New Republic and New York Review of Books art writer Jed Perl assigns himself such a gigantic challenge that I found myself blushing on his behalf… Read More Great Art Can Be Propaganda | First Things
Foucault’s Child-Sex Allegations Should Shock But Not Surprise us. He elevated common criminality into a virtue. Dr. Matt Treacy. The allegations that the French philosopher Michel Foucault – who has been long admired and oft-quoted by the liberal left in Ireland [and of course everywhere] – repeatedly “raped” pre-pubescent boys in Tunisia during his time as a… Read More Where the Radical Left Would Take Us
In Evelyn Waugh’s stunning classic, Brideshead Revisited, there is a scene which presses on my mind these days as I ponder so many forces gathering against a Church weakened greatly by the sins of her own children, both clerical and lay. All of us. It is the time when Sebastian, Lord Alex Marchmain’s idiosyncratic, drunkard, but… Read More Lord Marchmain’s Long Hate
“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved? In… Read More One Word of Truth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“World-renowned philosopher, humorist, newspaper editor, and university rector, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) is best known to American audiences for his book Something Beautiful for God (a classic biography of Mother Teresa that essentially introduced her to the West) and for his frequent appearances on Firing Line. A tart-tongued agnostic, Muggeridge was fascinated by the… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge. A Third Testament.
Catholic Critique 