The director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas delivered a delightful holiday treat that captures the magic of cinema and how one mechanism—the motion picture camera—can free us from the constraints of the purely mechanistic. Read More… Martin Scorsese turned 80 last month and he deserves celebration. He’s one of perhaps five directors in Hollywood who is respected as a master of the cinematic art, and the one most closely identified with the art itself. Perhaps this is because...

Hong Kong’s freedom fighter takes another brutal hit from Beijing. Read More… Held in solitary confinement, 75-year-old Jimmy Lai is still awaiting trial for the crime of resisting the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. On December 10, however, that grip got a little tighter. A Hong Kong court sentenced Lai to an additional five years and nine months on two counts of fraud, related to a leasing issue with his pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. According...

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller’s now infamous video calling civilian and military leaders to account for the Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle cost him his career. Was it worth it? Read More… On August 26, 2021, Stuart Scheller posted a video on LinkedIn and Facebook in which he strongly criticized senior U.S. military and civilian leaders for the embarrassing way in which the country had withdrawn forces from Afghanistan in the preceding days. The video was shared more than 40,000 times and “liked” over...

In its two film versions, a story about escaped convicts fleeing justice shows that whether you’re naughty or nice, there’s always hope for redemption. Although, at a price. Read More… Michael Curtiz, famed director of Casablanca, made a Christmas movie in 1955, starring Humphrey Bogart, called We’re No Angels, about the power of innocence and moral decency to transform even hardened criminals—of whom Bogart is one, the other two played by the famous British actor-director Peter Ustinov and the American...

Lai remains in prison as Hong Kong awaits word regarding Lai’s international legal counsel. Read More… Entrepreneur and freedom fighter Jimmy Lai’s fight for justice will now drag on for nine more months as the Hong Kong High Court adjourns his trial. The es as Hong Kong waits for Beijing to rule on allowing King’s Counsel Tim Owen, a British lawyer and internationalist specialist, to join Lai’s defense team in his fight against the country’s draconian National Security Law. The...

Whence the rugged individualism that is traditionally synonymous with being American? Was it there from the beginning, rooted in our founding documents? Or does the idea represent a later corruption that can be reversed in pursuit of a more religious or egalitarian republic? Read More… Americans are an individualistic bunch. Our popular culture makes heroes of outsiders, loners, and disrupters. Our politicians emphasize their independence of entrenched institutions, party discipline, and special interests. In economic affairs, we assume that success...

A new book shows how the greatest works of art were more than just opportunities to feel something but pilgrimages to the divine. Read More… In his essay “The Philosophy of Medieval Art,” Bishop Fulton Sheen opens with the statement, “There is no such thing as understanding the art in any period apart from the philosophy of that period.” In other words, far from being a frivolous elective course for aimless liberal arts majors, Sheen explains that the discipline of...

An important new addition to Lewis studies explores the influence of the medievals on Lewis the writer. But Lewis the thinker was just as importantly an anti-modernist modern. Read More… When es to evaluating C.S. Lewis’ engagement with medieval authors, Jason Baxter performs the heavy lifting with ease, almost with wings. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great prises, in effect, a sequence of primers on major and minor figures—Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Calcidius, Dante, Nicholas...

The director of such blockbusters as Jaws and E.T. and the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan delivers a thinly veiled autobiographical account of how he came to be a believer in our secular religion. Read More… Modern society has no shortage of candidates for substitute religions. Instead of attending religious services, we can assemble at football games; in lieu of studying the lives of the saints, we e to know Harry and Meghan. And, for much of the...

A new book asks us to consider what exactly the Gospel calls us to be and to do as citizens in a fractious, contentious, confusing time. Spoiler alert: It looks a lot like the cross. Read More… Our current political reshuffling has been dizzying, perhaps even more in the munity than among Americans in general. The conservative shift toward populism under Trump empowered both a push for real nationalism—blood, soil, industrial policy—as well as even more fringe movements such as...