The Professor's Bayonet

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...

Thinkers at the time of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason were engrossed with the project of imposing order onto the universe.  With the God-given faculty of reason, they argued, humankind, above and beyond every other creature, could navigate the world with greater insight and influence.  They saw themselves, in other words, as Adam-like in the sense that their mission was to "tend the gard...

I first read James Fenimore Cooper’s classic The Last of the Mohicans when I was around twelve years old.  Somebody had gifted me a set of abridged versions of a selection of American classics, and I devoured them one after the other.  It was not until I taught a section of Cooper’s work to my Honors students that I learned that the 19th century author was doing something quite clever in his telli...

According to Jewish mythology, Adam’s first wife was not Eve.  The Adam from the Book of Genesis was first wed to a woman named Lilith; however, she was not quite on board with her expected station in the Garden, so she was summarily banished, ejected, kicked out.  The insurrection in heaven had already taken place, which meant that Lilith, in her exiled state, was not exactly alone.  She was amon...

Years ago, when I was teaching in Spain, I discovered a museum that altered my understanding of what it means to be an artist.  Born in 1863 in Valencia, Joaquin Sorolla was a well-known painter, plying his craft just as the Modernist movement was picking up speed.  I had expected to be immersed in a world of experimentalism and the avante garde; however, I was quickly corrected when I was exposed...

One day, inexplicably, Gregor Samsa, the protagonist in Kafka’s 1915 novella, wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug. Common depictions have him as a cockroach. No matter the case, the metamorphosis is shocking yet quite telling. Samsa is, after all, a salesman who works a dead-end job to provide for his family. In many ways, his lot is one we can all relate to. Days turn into weeks, and...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not the only female writer to challenge the Doctrine of the Spheres.  The torch that was lit by Mary Wollstonecraft in her notable work “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” which was published in 1792 was carried forth by a number of aspiring liberators of the so-called weaker sex.  The Bronte sisters, Kate Chopin, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Fanny F...

John Steinbeck once wrote that “there is a line of old men standing on the edge of the Pacific, angry at the ocean for stopping them.”  He was, of course, referring to those who spent their youth as explorers, trackers, soldiers, cowboys – men who bridled at the very notion of remaining in the long-tamed East, preferring, instead, to strike out into the vast unknown – the West – brimming with poss...

“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift  Swift’s 1729 essay in which he proposes that, to alleviate their economic troubles, the poor people of Ireland should sell their children to the well-to-do for food, is standard fare when it comes to teaching satire. The Anglo-Irish writer lays out a quasi-reasonable argument and then happily suggests recipes for how the children be prepared kitchens across t...

“Of all tyrannies,” C.S. Lewis writes, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”  Abusive power, in other words, sometimes comes in sheep’s clothing.  The twentieth century was no stranger to this phenomenon.  To be sure, it was an era of totalitarian regimes: the Nazis and the Communists taking center stage.  Lewis, the famed author of The Chronicles...

In retrospect, it was an easy trap to fall into.  The loss of my father when I was nine-years old ignited in me the zeal to survive.  I mowed lawns.  I shoveled sidewalks and driveways.  I delivered papers.  I once even walked down to a local shop to ask for a job.  I had no idea what they produced, but I assured the bearded man that I could sweep up the sawdust – keep the place tidy.  I was turne...