Poetry: Browning at his Best
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
If I Were the Devil –The Rest of the Story
First we had C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in 1942, a classic apologetic novel written from the perspective of a senior tempter in the service of “Our Father Below,” offering sagely advice to his nephew, Wormwood. Then we had Paul Harvey and his well-known “If I Were the Devil” audio piece from 1965.
The Epiphany MAGA-Style
I don’t have much to say about what happened yesterday. The people who organized the demonstration and those, like the President, who merely agitated for it, must have known that whatever took place would play into the hands of the incoming administration and the media that represents them. Even if not a single law had been broken, they would have been portrayed as sore losers who cannot accept the results of a free and fair election.
Two Strains of Violence, Part Two: Two Cultures of Violence
Mexico and the United States are both known as violent countries, but there are important differences in the style—and the incidence–of criminal violence. Both are complex countries with varying ethnic and regional traditions.
When Jesus Was Born, A Talk by Dr. James Patrick
Viewed from within divine revelation, the answer to this question is given in Hebrews and Galatians 4:4. The answer is: in the fullness of time, when God had willed the coming of the Messiah. To answer it fully and precisely in the simple historical sense would require more knowledge than we now have.
Wednesday’s Child: Sodom Latest
Oscar Wilde, as the gentle reader may recall, was undone not by his own crime, which “love that dare not speak its name” was in those balmy days, but by the crime of libel, of which he had incautiously accused Lord Queensberry.
Two Strains of Violence, Part One of Two
For over 20 years, whenever the US Congress is debating a stricter immigration law, hundreds of thousands Mexican-Americans take to the streets. The demonstrators, often waving Mexican flags, demand rights for the illegals and accuse conservative Republicans of racism. The substance of much of their complaint is that Mexicans, illegal as well as legal, have made an indispensable contribution to the American economy, and yet they are treated with disrespect and hostility.
Clown Country
America zooms – or Zooms – into 2021 the laughingstock of the world. The global Guarantor of Democracy, bombing foreign lands with allegedly faulty elections at the drop of a parasol, continues limping toward a January 5 dual election for U.S. Senators from Georgia, a January 6 possible validation or invalidation of the presidential election by Congress and a January 20 inauguration of somebody who might have won the November 3 election.
Introduction to The Silents: The Classics
Calling the best silent films classics seems both humdrum and pretentious. Humdrum, because we tend to call any old thing classic, regardless of its quality. Pretentious, because what are most often called classics are the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome that modeled for subsequent Western literature its genres, forms, and techniques. Old movies just don’t seem analogous in quality, at least, to the epics of Homer and Virgil, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the picaresques of Apuleius and Petronius.
A Christmas Story of Anterus Smith as told to Ched Rayson, Conclusion
Coming out of his seclusion, Mickey announced a monster meeting in a field outside of Chequamegon. He did not have time to build a stage, but there was a nice little stream flowing through the field. One side of the ground was flat with room for hundreds of people to stand or spread out picnic blankets, and on the other side, there was a steep bank, which Mickey mounted, to make his pitch, which is why his speech has gone down in history as the “Sermon of the Mountebank.”
