“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”
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Category: Criticism
Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson
“Father Stu”: A Story of Hardship and Redemption
“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”
The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens
“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”
Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”
“Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”
Fifty Years of “The Godfather”
It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.
Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”
“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”
Dante’s Divine Valentine
“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”
Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”
“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”
The Relevance of Tolkien’s Unfinished Work “The New Shadow”
“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”
The Real Heroism of Odysseus
“Odysseus has before him the fantastical dream of every man: immortality and sex. He ultimately gives that up for mortality with his family.”
Is Ovid Still Worth Reading?
“Such politicized readings of the last 50 years miss the profundity of Ovid’s inclusion of the story in his grander poetic agenda of love being the constant star in the midst of a world of violence and transformation.”
Toward a Politics of Reconciliation: John Sayles’s “Lone Star,” after 25 Years
“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”
On the Eve of His Comeback, James Bond Resonates for a Reason
“Young Americans, myself included, need to resist the impulses of the day and keep striving. We may never be Bond types, but the quest for self-improvement is the point. To strive is to live.”
Flyover Blues: The Enduring Relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald
“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”
Review: Louis Menand’s “The Free World”
“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”
