The Great God Leviathan
Ishmael, alone among the crew of the Pequod, worships the whale, and Ishmael alone is spared.
Gaston Nerval
Faith is the Supreme Act of the Will: A Response to Zero H.P. Lovecraft
There is no reason why the Christianity which built Chartres Cathedral and conquered the empires of the New World should be incapable of taking us to the stars.
Farewell Mr. Smith
The high-water-mark of American civil religion was probably the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Jimmy Stewart plays the titular Mr. Smith, appointed by a feckless governor to fill an empty Senate seat. Once in Washington, Smith is forced to confront a corrupt political machine centered, to his horror,
The Anglican Mystic
“An hour’s conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.” War in Heaven, Charles Williams In the town of Oxford, there is a small tavern called the Eagle and Child, known locally as the “Bird and Baby.”
Martin Scorsese, Advocatus Angeli
Martin Scorsese’s central artistic concern is the city of New York, but the stories he chooses to depict are also linked by a common moral structure. He is powerfully drawn to opportunities to show how people maintain a belief in their own innocence. His protagonists are usually deeply flawed (to
Yukio Mishima and the Suicide of Artists
In the end, Mishima could not imagine what winning looked like.
The New Anti-Christ
The anti-Christs of the twentieth century sought to be worshipped instead of God. The anti-Christ of the twenty-first seeks to eradicate the capacity for worship altogether.
Where Your Treasure Is
Salvation or damnation usually hinges on a succession of choices no more consequential than where or on what to spend small amounts of time and money.
“They have healed the wound of my people lightly”: A Response to Bishop Barron
For all Barron’s undoubted goodwill, his appeals cannot help seeming glib, and even slightly evasive.
The Antithesis of Fatherhood
The mass shooting has become the signature horror of our time and place. Such events have become monstrously common, and yet we seem to understand them no better today than we did twenty years ago.