“Literature as logos is a series of windows, even of doors”

C. S Lewis

An Experiment in Criticism

Magdalena Kyne Magdalena Kyne

The Greatest of These: Love in Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Just as the characters in a comedy thwart death through love, literary works on love affirm that same reality. The destruction of the marriages contributes to the tragedy of King Lear, whilst the hope of Miranda and Ferdinand's wedding is instrumental in the comedy of The Tempest. Both plays involve conflict, but the outcome is determined by the characters choosing love (or failing to do so). Love, then, demonstrates a power to thwart vice, hubris, entropy, and ultimately time and death themselves.

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Angela Beatrice Angela Beatrice

For Those Who Cannot Pray: Eliot’s The Waste Land

By Angela Beatrice

Salvation through the cross; The Quartets through The Waste Land. So when we cannot pray, when our waste lands are too dense with debris and falsehood, we should pray in and with them, for the end is already decided; involving our cooperation with grace, all will be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Our waste lands are not wasted.

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Michael Murray Michael Murray

The Wisdom of Foolishness

A fool is one who cannot choose between heaven and hell, so he settles for earth and thereby chooses nothing. Paradoxically, the wise fool is one who understands his folly, and orders his soul in union with Divine wisdom. Within the motif of these texts, holy fools engender the world with confusion yet uphold the density and wonder of the mystery of reality. 

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Mary Therese Druffner Mary Therese Druffner

A Gradual Regeneration

By Mary Therese Druffner

It is easy to see that things have gone wrong,

How the life we live is not life at all.

Crippled under our smallness,

Our hands above our heads, resisting,

So that a sky of our broken hopes,

unanswered questions and the truth of ourselves

Might not crush our fleshless bodies.

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Maximilian Schmiesing Maximilian Schmiesing

The Law of the Heart: Romans 2 and Men Without Chests

By Maximilian Schmiesing

This idea that the demands of the law are written on the hearts of man is central to C.S. Lewis’s essay, “Men Without Chests,” and by discerning his message we can come to a deeper understanding of Paul’s message in Romans 2. 

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Magdalena Kyne Magdalena Kyne

The Feminine Genius and Lúthien Tinúviel

By Magdalena Kyne

J. R. R. Tolkien’s story of Beren and Lúthien found in The Silmarillion illustrates a woman living into her feminine genius, serving the man’s mission in a way that does not demean her strength, dignity, or equality with him.

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Makena Wisniewski Makena Wisniewski

Elie Wiesel and the Importance of Primary Sources

By Makena Wisniewski

Indeed, history does not achieve its aim in the death statistics of the concentration camps. Instead, Elie Wiesel’s witness as an ordinary man who endured the worst of hell, has contributed more to history than a textbook ever could.

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Magdalena Kyne Magdalena Kyne

The Cool of the Dawn: Chesterton and the Resurrection

By Magdalena Kyne

The rest of the poem covers the unfolding of Alfred’s understanding of this radical truth. He was granted a new way of seeing, and so was willing to be a fool for Christ, to be the person with their feet on earth and their eyes on heaven, and to lead with unshakable faith.

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Irene Tomasovic Irene Tomasovic

Then and Now (Original Poem)

By Irene Tomasovic

I know God,

He is my father,

Where I can fall into His freeness,

Flee from the world in His fortress,

And be made fully alive in His faithfulness,

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