There are good and bad ways of celebrating Halloween as there are good and bad ways of celebrating anything else. One of the best ways is with the reading of some haunting literature. Ghost stories come to mind. So does poetry which reminds us of death and the dead. Here is a handful of haunting [...]
Who's the hero of The Iliad? Is it Achilles or Hector? Or should they both be considered heroes? If we are to answer these questions, we need to know what is meant by heroism. We also need to know what Homer meant by heroism. Was the pagan Greek understanding of heroism different from ours? If [...]
Those of us who love literature are puzzled by those who are indifferent to its goodness, truth and beauty. We are perplexed by those who won't read fiction because they want the facts and nothing but the facts. We are bemused by those who won't read poetry, preferring prose, because they want to remain grounded [...]
What do the great literary epics tell us about the epochs in which they were written? And, more important, what do these epics and epochs tell us about our own epoch? To what extent are literary epics the children of their own times, expressions of their own particular zeitgeist, and to what extent are they [...]
Is it possible to summarize the meaning of life in a thousand words or so? Can the key questions that have preoccupied great philosophers for millennia be encapsulated in the idiomatic nutshell? The answer is yes. And the reason is that the key questions have been answered with authority by the Author of Life Himself. [...]
Newman’s conversion in 1845, sixteen years after Catholic Emancipation and five years before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, heralded the birth of a Revival which would see the resurrection of the Faith in the English-speaking world. In September 2010, I was honoured to be invited to serve as an official commentator on [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
S.P. Caldwell's "The Beast of Bethulia Park" offers a dissident perspective to the culture of death. This powerful novel about one particular surreptitious serial killer serves as a metaphor for our world, in which Big Brother has formed an unholy alliance with Dr. Death, putting in place the systemic extermination of the weak and the [...]
Something is stirring in the catacombs. A new cultural revival is thriving and emerging from the shadows. New works of fiction by Catholic writers are being written and published, which are as countercultural and refreshing as Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" had been when it had surfaced in similarly dark days in the mid-nineteenth century. The [...]
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the ways of God more strange and more beautiful than anything the mind of man can fathom. What else could explain Father Dwight Longenecker's journey from undergraduate at Bob Jones University, to Anglican country parson, to Catholic priest for the diocese of Charleston? At the conclusion of the [...]
Father Dwight Longenecker’s account of his own life’s adventure is subtitled “a somewhat religious odyssey”, indicating that his life, like all our lives, is a journey, or a pilgrimage, or a quest, the goal of which is, or should be, to get to heaven. “I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size,” wrote [...]
Against the reductionist nowhere man who cannot love his nowhere neighbour because he does not love his nowhere God, Chesterton presents us with the Everlasting Man, Jesus Christ, the personification of the good, the true and the beautiful, who is the incarnation of perfect wisdom and perfect innocence. My first book, Wisdom and Innocence: A [...]
Although we are halflings, we cannot remain halflings. We must either grow towards the wholeness of holiness or we must shrivel into the wreckage that Pride will make of our lives. Doing nothing is the sin of omission which leads to decay. We can either be Ring-bearers or Ring-wearers. We can either take up our [...]
Shakespeare's age was one in which sin was put at the service of secular tyranny and in which those who sought to practice the fullness of the Faith were held in scorn and punished by the enforcement of draconian laws. It was an age in which the battle for religious liberty was a matter of [...]