It was around 1973, and I was attending a small Midwestern college. This being the ’70s, the school was already busy debriding itself of its past Christian tradition and regenerating as a sort of flyover Dartmouth. I was in a…
If you make it to the end of Moby Dick (it’s been done), Herman Melville starts the epilogue with a quotation from the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Melville’s readers at the time…
I had the chance to meet a scholar recently, a woman from Norway. I went to hear her talk about a historical figure I’ve written about on this site before — Hans Nielsen Hauge (pronounced “HOW-geh”), the early 19th-century Norwegian…
I’m not a huge fan of the film The African Queen. I’ve actually only seen it twice. But I know it well enough to know that, much as I’d like to tell you I identify with Charlie Allnut, Humphrey Bogart’s character…
The news is full of the New York Times’ latest initiative in enlightening the masses: “The 1619 Project.” The plan is to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first black slaves in what would someday be the…
The philosopher Jacques Maritain called Marxism a Christian heresy (full disclosure: I haven’t read Maritain — I found it in a web search). That wasn’t an Olympian leap of logic — you cut the spiritual stuff out of Christ’s teachings…
Honor requires that I attribute the title of this piece to a Time magazine review of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published back in 1969. A good pun sticks with me for life. Another memory that’s stuck with me…
If you’re reading this article, it’s due to the forbearance of Wlady Pleszczynski, who could easily have rejected it as plain shilling for a book of my own. But I’m the translator, not the author, of Viking Legacy, by Dr….
It’s always risky to say anything about a prominent social pariah involving less than a call for hanging, drawing, and quartering. Yet, without defending the man’s pretty obvious crimes, I’d like to take a chance and say that I can…