Coincidentally: Table Talk
In October 1883 the poet and critic Matthew Arnold arrived in New York on the Cunarder Servia to begin a lecture tour….
Scaramouche, Sabatini, and Spadassinicide
Few are the stories that are vouched for by a lead sentence alone. It was the best of times, it was…
Descending into the Chocolate Factory: Are Dahl’s Works Worth it?
Every good child takes some pleasure in being bad. It is the perversity of human inheritance that forbidden fruit is fascinating….
On Pilgrim’s Progress
by Michael Yost
My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold. —Pilgrim’s Progress A generation…
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (Not for the Squeamish)
When Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the film rights for Brideshead Revisited, he visited a graveyard: Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He…
Journeying to Calvary
with the Blessed Mother:
Lynch’s A Woman Wrapped in Silence
By Miriam Schroder, Class of 2017 This is God’s chosen way with men, To take men’s way: and so the…
Flannery O’Connor’s Revelation:
Daily Encounters with Grace and Ugliness
by Paul Guenzel
It must surely be marveled at how one and the same word—nay, one and the same concept—elicits such different reactions….
The Ballad of Judas Iscariot and the Burden of Lent
Lent is a burden and a blessing. It calls Catholics to crawl beneath the weight of themselves to the Cross of…
Coincidentally: Moses and the Muses
The Anglo-Irish critic Robert Wilson Lynd observed that only in literature does coincidence seem unnatural. The literary Detection Club, whose…
Coincidentally: Animal Magnetism
The former mayor Marion Barry said of conditions in Washington, D.C., that “the crime rate isn’t so bad if you…
