Essays
Entries on ideas and trends in education and politics
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The devotion of modern life to the concept of equality has had the perverse effect of making the word “elite” into one of the most toxic words in the language. One can be called many bad things in life, but few are as bad as being called an “elitist.” To be an elitist in modern…
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To criticize movie violence is the surest way to be branded a scold, a moralist, a worrywart who refuses to understand that movies are not real. As someone who often revels in the visceral thrills of cinematic action and the bloodthirsty satisfactions of dramatic vengeance, I’m not inclined to fit that stereotype. But I also…
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A Fine Art of Balance Poetry Review As anyone who’s ever taken a course in literature knows, the two basic elements of any narrative are plot and character. Without these bare-bones elements a narrative loses its legs and collapses. Yet the hard part every writer struggles with is how to make their choices about plot…
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Film Review The Lives of Others The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years…
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Idea Review The Need for Moral Relativism Lorenzo Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest writing in The New York Times, has put forth a fascinating if flawed defense of Pope Benedict XVIth’s encyclical “God is Love”. His commentary correctly states that the resistance of many non-believers to religion centers around the idea of the intolerance of…
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As several papers have indicated in their editorials, blasphemy in their view is not a crime.Indeed, one could argue that blasphemy is a responsibilty for any democratic society…. Whether their ultimate aim is to preserve democracy or not is impossible to guess, but there is little doubt that no country can claim to be free…
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Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.Groundwork for a Poetic MetaphysicsEmotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world…. And though the dictionary…
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Film Review Lost In Translation America has always had a myth of itself as large and unruly. In this myth men are always cowboys or Jedi knights who ride off into the sunset or whiz across the sky at supersonic speeds. Alternatively the male hero is an entrepreneur or mad scientist who uses his ruthless…
Charles Durning Carroll 