In 1931, a Marxist intellectual by the name of Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote a foreword for the Russian translation of Friedrich Holderlin’s unfinished tragedy The Death of Empedocles. Luncharsky praises both the work and the person of Holderlin as demonstrating tremendous courage. Holderlin’s madness is not, for Lunacharsky, a symptom of
What do you get when you cross George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton? Maybe something like Jeymes Samuel’s The Book of Clarence? Musical comedies about Jesus belong to a fairly exclusive movie genre. Samuel’s latest offering will therefore remind many viewers of Monty Python’s Life
Writing to the literary critic and Southern Review editor, Lewis P. Simpson, from the family farm in Enterprise, Alabama, the already doomed poet John Finlay paused a moment to reflect on cattle. “I can’t help but like the cows,” he told Simpson. “They are good Thomistic animals and save one from
Vatican I infallibly defined papal infallibility, and given some of its side-effects, one might be forgiven for thinking that St. John Henry Newman was looking forward to our own day, not lamenting his own, when he wrote his famous “Letter to [Bishop William Bernard] Ullathorne”: When we are all at
Picture it: you are a normal priest, or you try to be, and you are a little less normal than usual because it is the week before Christmas: special liturgies, special confession times, family togetherness (yikes)! And then, your phone buzzes—and it buzzes again—and it buzzes again. Everybody is sending
Throughout his seminary and graduate school experiences, King worked relentlessly to develop a doctrine of God that made sense to him. From his father and other black preachers, he learned that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus worked cooperatively with humans to achieve the divine expectation that justice
Forgiveness is a poetic act. I am going to explain and support this claim in various ways, but here at the start, I want to turn to an unlikely source, the ancient and very pagan epic poet Homer. Forgiveness would seem to be a fundamentally Christian practice—“if you forgive others
For adult audiences revisiting the now classic 1990 film Home Alone, Kevin McCallister has become synonymous with a privileged rich kid who does not care about anyone but himself. Mincing no words, one Vice article puts it this way: “Kevin is, at his heart, a spoiled, entitled, rich suburban brat