“The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe. ” So wrote Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” This single sentence in brief summarized the whole of the controversy in religious circles over … Read more
Tolkien: Man and Myth Joseph Pearce, Ignatius, 1999, 242 pages, $24.95 Few writers and few books have inspired such extremes of opinion as J. R. R. Tolkien and the work that has become synonymous with his name, the fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings. Critics of the literary establishment certainly spared no insulting … Read more
As part of Crisis’ symposium on capital punishment, we reprint the following news reports. Other contributions this issue include this column by Abp. Charles Chaput, and this essay by Christopher Ferrara of The Latin Mass Magazine. ROME, OCT. 4, 2010 (Zenit.org). – The director of the Vatican press office says he is against recourse to … Read more
In a recent blog post for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, Jeff Dunetz laments that “Mel Gibson’s Catholic Faith Completely Contradicts Story of Judah Maccabee.” The blogger feels that this highly-troubled entertainer is the wrong choice to direct a film about an ancient Jewish hero. True, Mel Gibson’s Catholic faith contradicts many things, including Catholicism. Dunetz … Read more
If memory serves, this past year saw electronic books top printed books in the sales figures at Amazon.com. Be that as it may, books—real books—still make wonderful Christmas gifts. Here are some recently published (and read) titles I can recommend with enthusiasm. The Union War, by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press): As the Civil … Read more
I have to admit that it really didn’t impress me very favorably the first time I read it: “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization”—that will be the theme of next May’s World Day for Social Communications, the Vatican announcement said. That’s really strange, I thought. After all, even as it stands World Communications Day isn’t … Read more
Remember the slogan “ethics is playing catch-up with science”? It was one of the trusty clichés of science journalists in the heated debates five or six years ago over embryo research, “therapeutic cloning” and embryonic stem cells. From a layman’s point of view, the nub of the issue was this: adult stem cells were ethically … Read more
Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus Thomas Cahill, Doubleday, 1999, 333 pages, $24.95 The Book of Revelation does not prophesy a plague of shoddy Gospel scholarship, but surely one has descended on us. Some works have been simply outrageous (Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son) and some … Read more
How will you spend your Thanksgiving Day this year? Sleep in because you have extra days off? Settle down to watch football? Pull up a chair at four o’clock to eat a huge feast? Make plans for Black Friday, plotting with the multitudes to storm the stores and “shop-until-you-drop?” Why not consider another tradition? The … Read more
This article originally appeared in the April 2000 issue of Crisis Magazine. The “dialogue of love” between Rome and the Orthodox Churches that offered so much promise after nine centuries of ecclesial estrangement seems to be running out of breath as we enter the third Christian millennium. A dramatic breakthrough is needed to restore the … Read more
This column originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of Crisis Magazine. Repentance is good for the soul. In the past few decades, the Church has been called upon from various quarters to repent for her misdeeds over the 20 Christian centuries. And John Paul II has openly admitted some of the faults of … Read more
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses, Isabel Colegate, Counterpoint Press, 320 pages, $25 When the English novelist Isabel Colegate, author of the acclaimed The Shooting Party, discovered an abandoned hermit’s cell in her garden, she restored it and thereby acquired an interest in the subject of hermits and solitaries. The result … Read more
A review of Money and Beauty; Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities, an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence—September 17, 2011—January 22, 2012 In our current global economic crisis, what could be more timely than an exhibition of art that concentrates on money? The Strozzi Palace Foundation in Florence, Italy, currently has … Read more
This essay first appeared in the July 2001 issue of Crisis Magazine. Postmodern man– and postmodern woman– doesn’t know how to give a good party. It’s up to us Catholics to reclaim this lost art and share it with the world. Why? Because good parties are intrinsic to our Catholic faith. The liturgical year … Read more
You would think that having a personal physician would guarantee excellent health care. However, the conviction of Michael Jackson’s doctor for involuntary manslaughter suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Prosecutors described Dr Conrad Murray’s care of the pop singer as an “obscene” pharmaceutical experiment. Even royalty are not exempt. One of the sensational … Read more
“Just existing became what was important,” says 87-year-old Frank Kravetz of Pittsburgh, captive of the “hell-hole” that was Nuremberg Prison Camp. “Yet even as I struggled with the day-to-day sadness and despair, I never once had any regrets that I signed up to serve.” An extended tour of Nazi camps as a wounded POW scratching … Read more
With its divine foundation, sanction, and mission, nothing could be more glorious than the Catholic Church. But, of course, many people — even many baptized Catholics — don’t see it that way. Yet when the sins of men — secular material progress, or our own self-centeredness — blind us to this, they blind us to everything. The Renaissance, a … Read more
The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a classics teacher who has lived into a time when classics are regarded as irrelevant and useless. He is told that parents no longer want the school to produce the “complete man” but to qualify their sons to enter the modern world. Can he blame them? … Read more
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him. – Saul Bellow. In asking about the Papuan Proust, novelist Saul Bellow summed up the core problem with the twin idols of our age, Multiculturalism and Diversity. For the ideology of Multiculturalism—now dominant on most college … Read more
One of the fundamental characteristics of modernism, that cultural shift in the way we see the world, ourselves and our condition, was the celebration of the ordinary – ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary people and the ordinary things they do. Not everything about the “modern movement” – which began over a hundred years ago – … Read more
