A Day of Private Infamy: An Alzheimer Odyssey Postscript

By |2024-03-15T17:13:06-05:00March 15th, 2024|Categories: Joseph Mussomeli, Love, Timeless Essays|

August 1, 2021. A date of little import in world affairs. A day of savage sorrow, forlorn failure—and exhilarating liberation—for me. Few days in my life have I ever looked forward to so eagerly. None had I ever dreaded more. My eagerness was and remains unseemly and obscene. My dread, overwhelming and persistent. No more lies, no [...]

10 Hopelessly Romantic Classical Tunes for Valentine’s Day

By |2024-02-14T05:01:55-06:00February 13th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Love, Music|

So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]

The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen”

By |2024-02-12T19:27:56-06:00February 12th, 2024|Categories: Love, Marriage, Music, Paul Krause, Richard Wagner, Timeless Essays|

Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]

Dante’s Transformed Love: Musings on the Poet’s Love for Beatrice

By |2024-02-10T20:18:07-06:00February 10th, 2024|Categories: Art, Books, Christianity, Dante, Love, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

If the "Vita Nuova" had been the only major work Dante had made, this work alone would have earned him the reputation as a great poet of Western Civilization. It is well-known that Dante is one of the greatest poets in Western Civilization. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, is considered one of the crowning [...]

The Light of the Stars

By |2024-02-08T20:11:12-06:00February 8th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Death, Love|

Even in God's majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity. Death is a part of [...]

Chasing Lions: Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful

By |2024-01-15T18:05:45-06:00January 15th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Great Books, History, Literature, Love, Timeless Essays, Truth|

When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]

My New Year’s Resolution: Have More Enemies

By |2024-01-01T20:05:16-06:00January 1st, 2024|Categories: David Deavel, Love, New Year's Day, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Having more enemies, I believe, will sharpen my mind to the reality that in this new year I will have many fights that I must fight and also many opportunities to become perfect in the way that God alone has set out—by loving my enemies. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I rarely make [...]

The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

This Mortal Coil: Poems of DNA

By |2023-11-12T15:52:09-06:00November 12th, 2023|Categories: Barbara J. Elliott, Books, Love, Poetry, Science|

Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. This [...]

Memory, Love, & Eternity in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”

By |2023-10-05T19:13:46-05:00October 5th, 2023|Categories: Alfred Tennyson, Imagination, Literature, Love, Paul Krause, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” wrestles with the death of the poet’s closest friend, a death that pushed Tennyson into a bout of depression and an immense wallowing sorrow. But the poem is also an attempt to draw near the transformative power of love—a love that turns the cold and bleak midwinter into the high noon of [...]

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