On Looking for What We Have Been Given

by | Mar 28, 2016

“Giving one Catholicity, God deprives one of the pleasure of looking for it but here again He has shown His mercy for such a one as myself … who, if it had not been given, would not have looked.” —Flannery O’Connor, September 24, 1947, from A Prayer Journal (2013)A...

On Play and Seriousness

by | Mar 27, 2016

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. Beacon, 1950.“We must emphasize once again that play does not exclude seriousness.” —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1938. The classical Latin adjectives that we see associated with the Latin noun...

On What Is Not Found in English Departments

by | Dec 7, 2015

“English as It’s Taught” by Joseph Epstein, in A Literary Education and Other Essays. Axios Press, 2014. pages 335-40 (of 537).In A Literary Education and Other Essays is found Joseph Epstein’s 2011 review, “English as It’s Taught” in The Cambridge History of the...

‘Et tu, Brute?’

by | Aug 31, 2015

Julius Caesar was killed on the famous Ides of March, the fifteenth of that month, 44 B.C. The murder took place in the Senate, then meeting in the Theater of Pompey. Caesar had acquired dictatorial powers. Technically, the office of “dictator” was a legal one. It was...

‘Spoken with Sufficient Seriousness’

by | Jun 29, 2015

On April 12, 1656, Pascal began his XI Provincial Letter “To the Reverend Fathers, the Jesuits,” in this manner: “Reverend Fathers, I have seen the letters which you are circulating in opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality; and I...