Quæ medicamenta non sanant, ferrum sanat, quæ ferrum non sanat, ignis sanat. ∼ Hippocrates It doesn’t take a sociologist to know man is morally ill. It doesn’t even take one to know he suffers from moral diseases of two varieties, hidden and manifest. To the latter group belong tragedies great and small. To treat the … Read more
The extant portion of the six-mile long Civil War front at Cold Harbor, Virginia is small enough to explore in an hour or less. Although the National Park commemorating the battle is tragically shrunken, its rifle pits and trenches, creeks, meadows, and woods supply the visitor’s imagination with ample atmosphere for a phantasmal reenactment of … Read more
Urging his troops to manly fortitude in the face of Germanic barbarians, General Maximus of the 2000 film, Gladiator does not downplay the certainty that some of his Romans are about die. “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” he cries, and indeed, Maximus argues that the fact of death is all the more … Read more
Although the George Eliot novel is missing from some iterations of John Senior’s list of 1,000 Good Books, Silas Marner appears in the list as it appears in Senior’s diagnostic book, The Death of Christian Culture. This is strange considering the secular and atheistic philosophies that informed the work. That this Victorian novel contains some … Read more