Category: Literature
Astronomy with Dante
Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an Italian astronomer. Beginning in 1990, he was at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Florence, but he has retired from that. More recently, his interest has turned to his ancestor, the poet Dante Alighieri. This...
The Death and Immortality of Mortal Men in “The Lord of the Rings”
In a letter addressed to Dr. Rhona Beare, on October 14th, 1958, J.R.R. Tolkien states that The Lord of the Rings, “is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality.”[1] He also notes in a letter to Robert Burchfield on December 2nd,...
St Paul the Word Sower
“Word sower” deserves reviving. It comes from the Douay-Rheims translation of Acts 17:18: “What is it, that this word sower would say?” The word sower in question is the Apostle Paul, visiting Athens. “Word sower” is a literal rendering of...
There is no materialist path to the promised land.
“Eden is that old-fashioned House We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode Until we drive away.” ~Emily Dickinson “We shall never find / That lovely land / Of might-have-been” ~Ivor Novello “Literature is called artistic when it depicts...
Aardvarks and Alphabets
Just 35 miles from my home in northeast Cambodia, there lives an indigenous minority called the Kachok. There are about four thousand Kachok in nine different villages. While they are ethnically related to other tribes in our region, as well...
Hobbits and Empire: Geography and the Life of Nations in Tolkien’s Writings
As we journey through J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth, we find a remarkable variety of distinctive landscapes, from the rural towns of the Shire, to the abandoned halls of Moria, the Elvish tree-city of Lothlórien, the Forest of Drúadan, the...
Concentric Roots
In the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, the pilgrim and his guide come across two figures encased in flame. Virgil reveals to Dante that within this single fire dwells Diomedes and Ulysses, grieving over the horse that penetrated Troy. They...
Contemplative Realism: The Germinal Yearnings of a New Literary Movement
“Realists do not fear the results of their study.” —Dostoevsky Maybe I was a twenty-something romantic haunting the East Side of Milwaukee. A draught stole past the cream city bricks, trespassed the strips of sackcloth patching the window. Once a...
The World Becomes Light Again
I have long had an obsession with books. Since middle school, at least, I have loved to sit by a shelf and examine the titles, to arrange them, to examine their cover art, to read the summaries and flip through...
In Defense of Dante
I read Dante for the first time in my ninth grade English class at McNeil High School. I have hazy memories of my teacher lecturing about the first few circles of Dante’s inferno, but the mental image of the ninth...