Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that tragedies that feature the death of the hero—the sacrificial crisis of the innocent victim—reflect the fullest dramatic meaning of the Passion of Christ: In these stories, good violence is needed in order to make the bad violence go away. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Volume IV (The Action) of [...]
The tragedy is that the South’s tragic flaw—its defense of slavery—led to the defeat of its just demand for states’ rights and the consequent rise of the Federal Government, so that the original concept of the nation has been entirely lost. Recently, whilst staying with friends in Dickson, Tennessee, I came across an article in [...]
On September 11, 2001, Muslim terrorists attacked the United States on her own soil. Today, on the anniversary of this terrible event, let us recall the address of President George W. Bush in order to remember the innocent men and women who lost their lives. May God bless America. […]
Far from calling for microscopic views of reality and fishbowls, tragedies call for us to shatter the fishbowls and throw out the microscopes, to stop obsessing about our vulnerabilities and on how to overcome them, to stop thinking of ourselves as helpless victims of wicked forces. It is a grey day today. The sun was [...]
Enter three sisters as thunder and lightning clash above. Their very presence inspires both fear and wonder of the unknown. William Shakespeare’s broad audience of commoners, merchants, and nobility all readily acknowledge their supernatural presence, the stuff of superstition. But what was Shakespeare’s intent for their appearance? What are they? Imagine a smoking cauldron rising [...]
Our lives are marked by reversals and recognitions for which we are rarely prepared. That change will come is certain, whether on the stage or in your home. The only question is how you will receive it when it comes. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, [...]
Mrs. Maisel must decide, like all other men and women who follow a path that separates them from their family, home, gods, and city, whether the allure of a life in the spotlight and the total freedom it promises is preferable to, or reconcilable with, the many good things she risks turning away from… The [...]
There is a notable nightmarish and intangible quality to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as there is in many of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpieces—a vague sense of foreboding, a floating uneasiness, or shadowy moodiness that is beyond the power of words to express... Edgar Allan Poe. Enigmatic. Eccentric. Erratic. Melancholic. Alcoholic. Neurotic. [...]
Just as the Second World War ended, the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham became a bestseller. Perhaps more than any other, the noir genre fitted the mood of Post–war America. It was a nation that had not yet emerged blinking into the Technicolor 1950s of Eisenhower and later prosperity. It was an [...]
The Godfather is the Augustinian film par excellence–though it does not conclude where Augustine's vision ends... The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola is rightly considered a masterpiece. The drama of The Godfather is an epic; it is an epic because [...]
In Othello, William Shakespeare, the philosopher of everyday life, holds up a mirror to us and shows us what human beings are capable of. Beneath our most pleasantly cultivated exterior, there often lurks a serpent… William Hazlitt is widely recognized as one of the greatest of Shakespearean critics. Yes, there is Dr. Johnson; yes, there [...]
Maybe because I am particularly dense, I learned nothing of value for human living from all the brilliant mathematicians, esteemed physicists, and distinguished academics I have known. Instead, my mentor was a "curandero," a traditional healer from Northern New Mexico. Even his death taught me a profound lesson about life. When I moved to Santa [...]
Seeing something noble in Romeo and Juliet’s self-obsessive and self-destructive passion is to see it with eyes that are blind to the moral that Shakespeare teaches. Romeo and Juliet is not the only Shakespeare play that the modern world, modern critics, and modern teachers get wrong. Truth be told, Shakespeare abuse is rampant. Just about every [...]
The tragedy is not that the Russian Revolution is being forgotten; it’s that it is being remembered in the wrong way. It is being seen through rose-coloured spectacles, its grim reality being smothered in layers of romantic myth… This month is the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most important moments in modern [...]