Through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky focuses on the existential dimension of the problem of evil, seen in the suffering of children. Ivan even presents the key to the question—the kiss Christ gives the Grand Inquisitor—but he himself remains unconvinced, because he has not found the answer on the right grounds. An existential problem demands an existential answer, not an intellectual or theological one, and God gave it completely in Christ Crucified.

The seminal feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft placed the issue of women's education at the center of her famous treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She spells out the consequences of failing to educate women, especially with regards to morality and marriage. Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace explores the relationships between the sexes amongst the nineteenth-century Russian gentry, not dissimilar to the eighteenth-century English who were the focus of Wollstonecraft's critiques. While both men and women suffer the consequences of these women's actions, the text is not critical of the underlying dynamic that caused them. Tolstoy's novel provides examples of exactly what Wollstonecraft said would result if women were not educated, proving her point that he does not seem to agree with.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

By Irene Tomasovic

Red light, yellow light

Every light

Is a blur

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,

By Magdalena Kyne

Galadriel’s journey from rebellion in Valinor to rejection of the Ring embodies the feminine journey to holiness, going from Eve’s pride to Mary’s humility

By Makena Wisniewski

Augustine understands that the aim of Scripture is not only to amplify the intellect, but the heart; a Word powerful enough to convert the most ardent of sinners into the greatest of saints.

By Irene Tomasovic

they say the eyes are the window to the soul

they say that your eyes glow

they say I should know . . .