The Professor's Bayonet

Paul Kalanithi could have been anything.  He was a gifted individual who excelled in both the arts and the sciences, earning, among other degrees, a Master of Arts in literature from Stanford University.  His lot, however, was to be a medical doctor because he eventually ended up at Yale School of Medicine.  Kalanithi’s life could have continued to be storied as he was a rising star in the field o...

Decades after the publication of two of his most celebrated novels, The Grape of Wrath and Of Mice and Men , John Steinbeck, two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, embarked on a journey to rediscover America.  With his black poodle, Charley, Steinbeck trekked across the country in a camper he dubbed Rocinante: a humorous nod to Don Quixote’s mount in the 1605 and 1615 book by Miguel de Cervantes....

The formal term for that undeniable and oftentimes frustrating tendency toward sin is concupiscence.  Saint Augustine, in fact, in his Confessions uses the term to refer to sinful lust, and he would know.  Before he came to Christ, Augustine lived the life of a prodigal jumping from sexual adventure to sexual adventure.  His appetite was large, but soon enough, he learned that being steeped in so...

Written by Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame and published in two parts in 1853, “Bartleby,    the Scrivener” is the sad story of a man, Bartleby, who finds work as a scribe with a Wall Street lawyer.  Though the work consists of copying by hand reems of dull legalese, his efforts, at first, are productive.  He is a model employee.  Soon, however, quiet and aloof Bartleby begins to answer his empl...

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra called it her “salad days” -- those bygone days when the skies seemed to be bluer, the air fresher, and there was not even the suspicion that old age could ever happen to you.  I recall a professor I had in graduate school reflecting on those lines.  He took long pauses.  The rest of the narrative arc in the play simply fell to the wayside.  For a moment, it was as if he an...

Paula Delgado-Kling’s aptly named book, Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood , details in vivid and sticky language the plight of a poor Columbian girl whose destiny could never be anything else but what it was: a tangled, complicated, and, ultimately, violent relationship with the only authority that even pretended to care about her and others like her: the FARC or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaria...

American poet, Jane Kenyon, was only forty-seven years old when she died in 1995.  Her death, like all who die so young, was tragic, and it resonated throughout the literary community.  A few years afterward, I became a teaching assistant for a professor in graduate school who knew her widower personally, fellow poet Donald Hall, and I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at an event on campus....

Shooting an Elephant , George Orwell’s 1936 essay describing the shooting of a once-aggressive elephant in British-occupied Burma remains a proper indictment of colonialism.  At its height, the sun truly did not set on the British empire with its tentacles reaching India and Africa, Australia and North America.  Because of British imperialism, folks in Zimbabwe do not eat cookies; they eat biscuit...

The 2005 film version of C.S. Lewis’s beloved classic, The Chronicles of Narnia , is a treat to watch.  For the most part, it is true to the original text, doing honor to the former atheist turned devout Christian who penned it.  The special effects brought to life Lewis’s tale in unique and engaging ways, and even now, dear listener, I occasionally Google the scene where Aslan roars just after hi...

Medical ethicist Charles Camosy brilliantly offers the following analogy about the current state of Western culture.  The West, he argues, is like a flower that has been recently cut at the base of its stem.  It will retain its beauty for a time but not forever.  Cut off from its roots – its source of nourishment – it will wilt, then fade, then perish altogether in the vase in which it sits.  The...

In his 2008 book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church , Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright tackles several misconceptions many have about what happens when we die.  Popular thought is that, if we are good, we pass on to heaven never mind what feelings and convictions we harbor about Jesus Christ.  Being nice or, as the saying goe...

It was likely the first time I appreciated the power of story, and I was only a boy of about four-years-old.  Charlotte’s Web, which was written by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams, and published in 1952 by Harper and Brothers, was not read to me before bedtime; rather, like many other kids who were born in the 70s, I experienced this classic work of children’s fiction via what my grandfa...

The first version of Jack London’s classic short story, “To Build a Fire,” was published in 1902, but we are going to explore the most popular version: his 1908 revision that contains a native dog.  The unnamed protagonist is seeking his fortune in the Yukon territory where the temperature can drop well below zero.  The conditions can be brutal, but despite the warnings of an older man from Sulphu...

Noelle Mering’s book, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology , details in gripping language how so many twisted ideas are currently running rampant throughout Western society.  Objective truth is under assault, and to reject woke orthodoxy is to invite vicious criticism from its militant disciples.  A spade can no longer be called a spade if doing so departs from...

The first line of Walt Whitman’s popular poem, “Song of Myself” reveals much about the current state of the American union.  He writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” -- a line as simple as it is direct.  The crescendo leading up to this statement, of course, is decades, even centuries long; however, for our purposes, we might simply say that the Age of Reason that largely took place in the...

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost  The poem is worth quoting in its entirety:  Whose woods these are I think I know.       His house is in the village though;       He will not see me stopping here       To watch his woods fill up with snow.       My little horse must think it queer       To stop without a farmhouse near       Between the woods and frozen lake       The darkes...

Impressively, Mary Shelley started to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus , when she was just eighteen years old.  She had been in Geneva, and to stave off boredom due to having to stay indoors as a result of inclement weather, Shelley, along with stepsister Claire Clairmont and other literary greats Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, decided to have a fiction writing co...

The Marquis de Sade was born in 1740 to a French noble family.  Writer, political activist, and most notably libertine – or someone who questions or challenges most moral principles, especially those concerning sex – his influence on Western culture remains significant.  His major works – The120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom – combine disturbingly graphic descripti...

Built in 1882, Struthers Library Theatre, located in Warren, Pennsylvania, stood as the cultural epicenter to the many denizens of this forested community.  The Victorian-styled venue once featured, to name a handful of entertainment dignitaries, Harry Houdini, John Philip Sousa, and Cecil B. DeMille, and it was also squarely in the Vaudeville circuit.  This grand stage, nestled in the rolling hil...

In his poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” 19th century Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, famously penned the following lines: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;  The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar; / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who...

I used to write with a British accent.  The voice in my head as I wrestled with ideas, looking for connections, hoping for conclusions, reaching for just the right word was an invention.  I had never been to England, you see.  I grew up in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania – Youngsville, if you are interested – and, but for Canada, which to us never really counted, had never been out of th...

For those of my listeners who do not know, it is a tradition to recite the prayer of Saint Michael at the end of Mass in the Catholic Church.  As a convert to the faith, I had to learn this powerful prayer, so I could join the chorus of those petitioning Saint Michael to “defend us in battle” and to “cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls....

At the time of my writing of this episode, philosophy professor Peter Kreeft’s book A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist has only 134 ratings on Amazon.com.  This, I contend, is not a reflection of the quality of Kreeft’s writing nor of the content he explores but, rather, what is typically chosen as casual reading.  The book, as my old college roommate used to say, is a...

Love You Forever – written by Robert Munsch, illustrated by Sheila McGraw  In 2007, my oldest daughter, then a newborn, was gifted with this classic children’s book. The story’s arc is simple, yet the message remains powerful. A mother rocks her child in various stages of his life, singing the same lullaby: I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be....

In his New York Times bestselling book The Road to Character , David Brooks explores the Adam I and the Adam II archetypes – the two opposing sides of our nature taken from the two accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis.  Adam I is all about building a resume.  His focus is external.  It is about position.  About promotion.  Degrees earned.  Awards won.  Being the perfect company man.  Adam I...