Recently, I was asked to name the top five American novels. Let me boil down the list to two: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In some ways, two books could not be different for I believe that in them, we have represented the two broad strokes in which the [...]
Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category
Ishmael and Huck–Waters I Have Known
Posted in Literature, tagged Literature, melville, river fiction, sea fiction, twain on January 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Favorite G.K. Chesterton Passages
Posted in Art, Literature, Religion, tagged chesterton quotes, Thomas Aquinas on January 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
G.K. Chesterton (1818-1901), the great British mystery writer and Dickens critic, wrote a life of Thomas Aquinas called The Dumb Ox, a pejorative leveled at Aquinas’ bulking presence and quietude by some of his fellow students. Chesterton asserts that nothing could be further from the truth and spends the whole of the book praising Aquinas’ [...]
High Art: The Beautiful Writing of Anton Ego in Ratatouille
Posted in Art, Culture, Literature, tagged Anton Ego, Art, film, Ratatouille, writing on January 5, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Well, it certainly ain’t James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but Ratatouille, Pixar’s stellar computer animated film about a Rat’s quest to cook, has some great language capping the end of the film. The writer behind the food critic, Anton Ego, uses a turn of phrase and some self-analysis of a critic’s role that is both [...]
C.S. Lewis on Miracles
Posted in Culture, Literature, Religion, science, tagged C.S. Lewis, miracles, science on December 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Ever get flustered by watching National Geographic, The Discovery Channel, or The History Channel explain away the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, Jesus’ walking on water, or the resurrection with a scientific explanation for each? I also sigh when I hear people say that the birth of their child is a “miracle,” [...]
