I wish to begin this review by saying that The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2010, Penguin Books) ranks among my favourite books, so my criticism comes from the only place that truly good criticism can come from: fondness. Grossman’s work was first introduced to me by my closest friend, who
God knows what he is about, Newman muses, and our part is but to cooperate with his grace, however unusual the guise in which that grace comes to us. After all as St. Paul says, “the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom” (1 Cor 1:25). This is what
Two years ago, I began to study Greek at the St. Irenaeus Center. Since then, I have been working my way through the New Testament in the original, reading and listening and speaking the text out loud. A few months ago, my studies raised a question about how to understand
“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.”
One of my priest classmates on an Ordination picture he gave me penned: De laudatoribus temporis acti fiemur fautores temporis laudabilis in servitio Dei. A rather free translation would be: “Just as we esteemed a time gone by as worthy of praise, may we now become agents of praise and
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
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I recently
In the end, Mishima could not imagine what winning looked like.