The hidden life of Franz Jägerstätter offers us an example of how to love our fellow citizens in a time of partisan antagonism and division.
Category: Art
Art
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The Beauty of Self-Giving Love in Anna Karenina
If we combine the beauty of art and the power of narrative with rational argument, we can convince people of the worthiness of marriage and family life more effectively than by argument alone. Anna Karenina is an example of how to do this. It beckons the reader to choose the better path, contrasting the destructive adultery of Vronsky and Anna with Levin and Kitty’s enchanting journey into the life of married love.
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Why Your Daughter—and You—Should Watch the New Mulan
Mulan is worth watching because it is a great movie with a compelling plot. And it teaches an important truth: a girl does not have to pretend to be a man in order to excel in a traditionally male domain.
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Beauty and Charismatic Humanities
In order to win the undergraduates once more, the humanities have a clear course to follow. They must abandon identity politics, which only produce a tense and humorless classroom. More deeply, they must insist upon the old appeals to genius, greatness, masterpieces, beauty, and sublimity.
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Flannery O’Connor, Sanctity, and the Psychology of Racism
Flannery O’Connor drew on her understanding of the evil within her in composing her brilliant fiction. Far from being the simple racist that recent attacks have made her out to be, she authored some of the most probing accounts of the psychology of racism in American literature.
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Isolation Cinema: The Films of John Ford
John Ford’s America is a good deal like Ford himself—loud, brawling, and hard-charging. Ford’s Americans are also honorable, self-sacrificing, and faithful to their promises. That’s not the whole truth about America, not by a long shot. But it’s true enough that in John Ford’s films, we will forever see something of ourselves.
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Isolation Cinema, 1939 Edition
While you’re stuck at home, why not elevate your viewing with some classic films from the golden age of American filmmaking?
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Speech and Conscience in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
How does one film the work of the conscience, hidden as it is? How does one capture the internal struggle to speak when confronted by the demand for conformity? Terrence Malick successfully recreates this struggle for us in his latest film, A Hidden Life; and while his story focuses primarily on the struggle of one historical individual, the experiences Malick captures on film deepen our understanding of and sympathy for the precarious condition we all share.
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Zombie vs. Bigfoot: The Mythology of American Monsters
In the Halloween death match between Bigfoot and zombie, the mask we choose may reveal our national mood.
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When Impressions Supplant Reality: The Reign of Ironic Memes
With the help of memes, ironic satire has upended public morality, and without sound morals, hyperbole and reality, irony and sincerity, become indistinguishable.
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The Fault Lies in Ourselves: Coriolanus at the Royal Shakespeare Company
Seeing Director Angus Jackson’s Coriolanus should be uncomfortable for anyone who loves republican government, regardless of political leaning.
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Race, the Legacy of Slavery, and American Promise
A new documentary about the Thirteenth Amendment and the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans is a wake-up call to conservatives who feel threatened by apparently unpatriotic protests or demands for racial justice.
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Lessons from Vincent Van Gogh: Celebrity Culture and the Rights of Domestic Workers
Our treasured religious beliefs tell us time and time again to care for the poor and the destitute and to love the strangers among us. We know that domestic workers and underprivileged laborers deserve our care and attention, but in our celebrity-suffused culture, we often forget this truth.
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Boyhood: A Profoundly Human Story
Richard Linklater’s new film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”
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What Creative Fiction Can (and Cannot) Do
To engage and shape the culture, we must understand the power of storytelling—and respect its limits.
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The Sacred Tradition of Offending People: Why Our Society Needs Pamela Geller
We need offensive cartoons, obnoxious cartoonists, and offended sensibilities. Without them, society stagnates and tyranny reigns.
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Exodus: Gods & Kings: What Does God’s Voice Really Sound Like?
With its controversial decision concerning the voice of God, the movie “Exodus: Gods & Kings” demonstrates the limits of what we can really know about God.
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Complementarity: Lessons from Little House in the Big Woods
The family is only whole and safe when it is founded on the complementarity of masculine and feminine.
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Stephen Colbert Meets His Maker
The most prominent Catholic character on television consistently employed religious themes and theological motifs on his award-winning TV show—never more glaringly so than in the series’ grand finale
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Driving to Nebraska: Cinema, Human Dignity, and the Elderly
At times, cinema succeeds where philosophy fails. Films like Nebraska show us the importance of honoring our elderly parents and remind us of the unique dignity of every human person.
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What’s Wrong with the Family? “I Am.”
To restore loving family life to the heart of our culture, we must begin with ourselves—one family, one person at a time.
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“Be Fruitful and Multiply”: The Imperative of Creativity in Art and Religion
Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s vision of creativity reflects the theological concept that man is made in the image of God.
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How Good Intentions Make Bad Art: Christian Reviewers and Aronofksy’s “Noah”
Good art helps us see reality how it is. Thus, the artist must attend to what is, looking at the world as carefully and deeply as possible—even the parts that make him uncomfortable.
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Timeless Beauty: Conservatism’s Modernist Problem
Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.
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Nameless Beauty: Conservatism’s Architecture Problem
The enduring values in which conservatives believe—beauty among them—are more multifaceted and surprising than we sometimes give them credit for. Beauty does not always follow rules, and it is often found in unexpected places and patterns.