A sincere believing relative bemoaned the crass commercialization of Christmas. My reaction: “It’s worse than you think.” I mean it cheerfully, actually. I’ll try to explain. People do the whole Christmas thing regardless of their beliefs because it’s fun. There’s nothing inherently evil in it, and there’s some good. So I don’t think there’s any […]
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Silence
Liam Neeson has just the right kind of face for the concerned sincerity that you would expect the devil to have. He was well-cast in this Martin Scorcese movie. Silence is about two kinds of silence: the putative silence of God about His own existence, and then that silence requited by man’s. In the early […]
Read more...Constantine Oprisan
This is a reprint of a portion of a 1996 interview of the late Orthodox priest George Calciu, who spent years of torture in the communist Romanian gulag for being a Christian priest. He was speaking of his cell-mate, Constantine Oprisan. This was also posted on Rod Dreher’s blog on December 7, 2017. I was […]
Read more...Kingship
Imagine you’re a king, riding your majestic white steed through the forest. You stop in a little village for water and are served by a humble village girl. She enchants you. You speak with her and find that you’re falling in love with her. But now you’ve got a problem. She can’t really love you in […]
Read more...Top-Soil
More Roger Scruton. Here’s an excerpt from Modern Philosophy, in which Scruton is talking of the sterile landscape left by scientistic reductionism: The meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions that science does not endorse: conceptions like beauty, goodness and the soul which grow in the thin top-soil of human discourse. This top-soil is […]
Read more...Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is ruining me as a writer. He precisely balances the need for tension to drive the story line, on the one hand, with a slow reveal of plot through an unreliable narrator, on the other. It’s difficult to pull off, but he does it magnificently. The trouble is, I like it so much […]
Read more...Copperhead
Copperhead is a movie on Amazon Prime. I stumbled across it, and found it to be a gem. It’s set during the Civil War, and that made me skeptical at first. Am I going to get a long condescending lecture on how slavery is bad? But I quickly saw that there would be more […]
Read more...Modern Philosophy
A review of Modern Philosophy (Penguin 1994) by Roger Scruton. This book is, as subtitled, “an introduction and survey,” but there is also an underlying thesis in Scruton’s arrangement of subjects. By “modern philosophy” he means not merely recent developments in philosophy, but an emphasis on philosophers since Descartes who are “modernists” – committed to […]
Read more...Asher Lev
A review of My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. This book is narrated in the first person by the fictional title character, who grows up as a Hasidic Jew. The author invented this particular Hasidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, but we can take it as an accurate picture of Hasidic life. The […]
Read more...Rebellion
We’ve come to think of teen rebelliousness as a natural rite of passage, wherein a young man or woman chafes against family restraints on freedom. It seems to be an inevitable result of every person’s desire to be free. Is it inevitable? Yes and no. Yes On the one hand, there is a kind of […]
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