By Campbell Collins In his new book, Fire on the Altar: Setting Our Souls Ablaze through Augustine’s Confessions, C. C. Pecknold presents a “Catholic understanding of Augustine” (3) and thereby helps readers’ “souls to be set ablaze by that fire which burns for us in heaven and upon the Church’s high altar” (14). Pecknold’s approach is, perhaps, peculiar. The book is neither fish nor fowl: … Continue reading Fire on the Altar: A Review
By Campbell Collins Much of Hillsdale has sojourned in Tolkien’s Shire, and many students count the Bagginses and the dwarves, Gandalf the Grey and dear Sam Gamgee among their childhood playfellows. In his new book, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, Ben Reinhard encourages us to return to Middle Earth with a more attentive eye, seeking out the influence of the Catholic liturgy in Tolkein’s … Continue reading The High Hallow: A Review
by Aidan Jones Among my many pet peeves is when self-proclaimed “artistic types” scoff at the great artistic achievements of our ancestors. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” they snort, scorning a simple pastoral painting in favor of a meaningless combination of colors that some tortured soul was inspired to plaster across a canvas. They grin determinedly through an atonal opera, explaining that … Continue reading Beauty for the Common Man
“He was born scentless and senseless, he was born a scentless apprentice.” Every so often there comes a work of literature whose deep themes express the darkness of human thoughts and beg the mind to inquire into the sheer hysteria of the human psyche. Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Süskind, is one such book. The story of Perfume forces the reader to … Continue reading Obsession: Perfume, and Humanity’s Depraved Desires
This famous novel written by Miguel de Cervantes is often presented as the story of a man who seems to have lost his mind after reading too many chivalric books and starting to see the world in a distorted way. The adjective “quixotic” is a synonym of “impossible”, “imaginary” or “unrealizable”; denoting the folly of the acts and thoughts of the novel’s protagonist: Don Quixote de … Continue reading Don Quixote: A tale of Sanity in Times of Madness
“Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light a such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” An old woman strikes a match and drops it on her kerosene-soaked books while the firemen stare in horror. This is the America promised us in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where the printed book is banned because it … Continue reading The Flame of Civilization: Fahrenheit 451 and the Preservation of Western Culture
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