Uncategorized
Structure and Theme in Lear
Note #1: Act 1, scene 2 of King Lear, which initiates Edmund’s plots against father Gloucester and…
Freak of History
Diarmaid MacCulloch starts his study of the Reformation, All Things Made New, with a sketch of the…
Voting in Fear and Trembling
The election of 2016 confronted me with a crisis. My actuarial life expectancy has me down to…
House of Wisdom
1 Chronicles 22 records a lengthy speech from David to his son Solomon. The very setup suggests…
Sources of Apocalyptic
In his 1892 Lectures on the Apocalypse (29–30), William Milligan argues that “the symbolism of the Revelation…
Junior Varsity Angel Wrestling Team
The last thing you see in writer-director Stephen Cone’s 2011 film The Wise Kids is its dedication:…
Limits of Pen and Tongue
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 103 laments the limits of language to capture the thing it describes. “Look in your…
Church With Soul of America?
The paragraphs below are taken, with slight changes, from a column I wrote at Firstthings.com in July…
How to Mark the Death of a Devil?
“What pleasure should I find in the death of a sinner, the Lord God says, when he…
The Travails of Lieutenant Marty
One of the standard techniques in political propaganda, left and right, is to present ideas or events…
A House by and for Nations
After David sinfully takes a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21), the threshing site where he builds…
Love Well What You Leave
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 embodies the excessiveness of poetry. It’s possible to summarize the poem in a brief…
Solidarity and Dynamism
White Eagle, Black Madonna: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Traditionby robert e. alvisfordham university press,…
Womb or Tomb
Like many Renaissance writers, Shakespeare is obsessed with mutability, with the vaporous quality of human life. Nothing…
Justification and Joy
In Ecclesiastes 9, Solomon urges, “Go, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a…
