Faith • Liturgical Reflections The Beautiful and the Useful: Hugo, Les Miserables, and Lent Dr. Steven Garber | 4 min read “You are mistaken; the beautiful is as useful as the useful… more so, perhaps.” These words have been running through my heart the last week. Making sense of life for life, of what matters and what doesn’t, of what we believe to be the good, the true and the beautiful, and what is not, is... Continue Reading
Culture • Popular Culture The Seven Basic Plots and the One Basic Plot: Cosper, Booker, and The Stories We Tell Will Herron | 9 min read Being parents of young children, it was a rare occasion (even pre-pandemic!) when my wife and I were able to get out to dinner and a movie. Our last cinema outing had ended with us both falling asleep (an unfortunate reflection of our engagement with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug). On this occasion, however,... Continue Reading
Culture • Popular Culture In Praise of a Good Morality Tale: the Simple and the Complex in the Fiction of Elizabeth Goudge Becca Hermes | 11 min read Bibliotherapy. Never heard of it? Neither had I, at least by name, until browsing a lifestyle magazine a few months ago. Perhaps you are familiar with this term. For those who aren’t, PsychologyToday describes it as “facilitating psychological growth and healing through reading.” All kinds of books can be therapeutic, and counselors who use bibliotherapy... Continue Reading
Faith • Theological Reflections The Ordering of Our Loves Dr. Steven Garber | 3 min read Ordo Caritatis. Some words and ideas are worth holding onto, especially ones that take us to deeper places of the heart, that ask us harder questions of the heart— and even more, ones that offer the hope that all is not lost, and that our fragmented selves can be reordered, that we can be made... Continue Reading
Culture • Popular Culture On “Silence” and More Dr. Steven Garber | 5 min read “But did he hear their screams?” My wife Meg is named after two martyrs who lost their lives during the horrible “killing times” of Scotland in the 17th-century. Two Margarets, one an older woman and the other a girl, were staked in the bay as the tide came in, condemned to death for their refusal... Continue Reading
Faith • Theological Reflections On Laughter and More Dr. Steven Garber | 4 min read “The devil laughs because God’s world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God’s world has its meaning.” When I first read those words, I was struck by their hard-won wisdom. Milan Kundera, one of the great novelists of the 20th-century, wrote about the challenge of being human in the... Continue Reading
