The Best Laid Schemes: Tragedy in Broken Fences. Burns’s words frame this unsettling film, where each attempt at renewal — reconciliation, romance, community — becomes the very channel through which destruction enters.
Month: August 2025
This article proposes a “tragic theory of history”: that human affairs are shaped less by steady progress than by the recurring triumph of selfishness over conscience. From Henry VIII’s dynastic obsessions to Gandhi’s appeal to non-violence, history shows how intelligence can serve desire or compassion depending on whether consciousness is awake or blinded. Unless conscience is recovered and lived inwardly, the path of power and technology points not to progress but to catastrophe.
The Myth of Precision Latin is often praised as a “precise” language. Teachers point to its cases, moods, and tenses as proof of clarity. But grammatical elaboration does not automatically guarantee precision. Latin trained its users to pursue precision, but it did not deliver it automatically. Everyday Latin vs. Literary Latin What survives of Latin …
From Carmina Burana to Frankenstein and Stravinsky, this essay explores humanity’s hybrid nature — torn between instinct, spirit, and desire.
Aldous Huxley begins Island with a curious little scene. Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist, is shipwrecked off the coast of Pala. Half-conscious and aching, he is discovered by two island children. They tend his wounds, but they also insist on something odd: he must tell them what has happened, again and again. At first Farnaby …
“The kingdom of God is within you.”— Luke 17:21 Introduction Much has been written about the originality of Jesus and Paul. Yet their teaching, once stripped of the dogma and myth that accumulated in later centuries, is not unique. It is part of a long human tradition of moral and psychological wisdom. In fact, its …
Jesus the Teacher and Paul’s Vision of the Transformed Self Jesus and Paul are often set against one another — the teacher of the Kingdom on one side, the apostle of the risen Christ on the other. Yet at heart they were saying the same thing. Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God within; Paul …
Suggested featured image: a weathered farmhouse by the water’s edge, evoking Maryland’s coastal setting. The Film Homecoming is a made-for-television drama first aired on Showtime in April 1996. Directed by Mark Jean, it adapts Cynthia Voigt’s 1981 novel of the same name. The cast is led by Anne Bancroft as Abigail Tillerman, with Kimberlee Peterson …
Social preview / subtitle:David Gordon Green’s Joe adapts Larry Brown’s 1991 novel with raw Southern grit, but its inverted parables of the Sower and the Samaritan make it one of the bleakest explorations of evil in modern cinema. Introduction David Gordon Green’s Joe (2014) adapts Larry Brown’s 1991 novel of the same name, keeping its …
The Arab Spring of 2010–11 was hailed at the time as a democratic awakening. Crowds in Tunis, Cairo, and Benghazi called for dignity, freedom, and justice. In reality, it left behind civil wars, state collapse, and new refugee crises. Why did some Arab states unravel while others, like Saudi Arabia, remained untouched? The deeper issue, …