Category: REVIEW

Norma Lacks a Flame

Sonya Yoncheva lacked that flame in crucial moments, though comparative listening across performances suggests that Maurizio Benini’s pedestrian conducting may well have been the culprit.

Tradition in a Homeless World

Defending tradition in an anti-traditional world such as ours requires both belief and boldness. Tim Stanley manifests both, combining wry humour and a sense of peace with the world unseen in many political polemics.

Forgotten Classics: Three Men in a Boat, Humor, and Humility

An honest sense of one’s own failings and shortcomings is part of what makes levity possible. One of the best books I know for inculcating humility through humor is Jerome K. Jerome’s novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).

A Batty Lohengrin Flaps New York

Lohengrin, with its lush music and tragic exploration of trust, betrayal, and forbidden knowledge, has imaginative gifts to offer contemporary audiences. The music still soars, but only to the cave ceiling, not to the skies.

Utopia: The Perennial Heresy

For the Utopian, a unified and uniform mass of humanity is enabled by the “abolition of war,” which in turn can only be safeguarded by a “supranational agency, ultimately a world government.”

Daphne Blooms in New York

Strauss’s opera prizes innocence in a time of chaos, beauty over disorder, and the transcendence of suffering. Daphne is precisely the work that could lend itself to the revitalization of an opera company.

Whetting the Appetite for Battle

Whetting the Appetite for Battle

Fighting Back does more than simply hope that the dire state of our culture can be reversed. It offers practical strategies, across every aspect of life, for turning things around and emerging victorious.

January 12, 2023
The Politics of the Passion

The Politics of the Passion

Jesus Christ died unlike he had lived: politically. D. L. Dusenbury urges us to reassess the gospels.

The 9th Art: Should Adults Read Comics?

The 9th Art: Should Adults Read Comics?

Are comics, as some Francophones argue, a distinct ‘9th art’? In the first of a monthly series, Felix James Miller argues they are and introduces readers to some of the delights of the art form.

January 7, 2023
Through the Church Year with Thomas Aquinas

Through the Church Year with Thomas Aquinas

The theology of St. Thomas Aquinas is suitable for leading today’s secular and increasingly godless world back to the salvation of the Gospel.

January 5, 2023
FORGOTTEN CLASSICS: <br>Dante’s Youthful Passion and the Love of God

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS: <br>Dante’s Youthful Passion and the Love of God

Dante’s La Vita Nuova is indisputably the work of a young man, a man whose passions (and poetic compositions) are still discovering the place they ought to have in the world. Thankfully, though, Dante’s ‘immature’ juvenilia is far greater and more penetrating a work than most poets can ever compose in the entire course of their lives.

December 31, 2022
Where’s the Rage? Cherubini’s <em>Medea</em> Strikes Out on the Metropolitan Opera’s Opening Night

Where’s the Rage? Cherubini’s <em>Medea</em> Strikes Out on the Metropolitan Opera’s Opening Night

An apt but uncharitable description of Medea’s incongruities might paraphrase Woody Allen’s description of a monster as a being with the body of a crab and the head of a social worker to say that Cherubini’s work sounds like a Mozart opera with a Beethoven overture.

December 29, 2022
All Views Are Welcome—Provided They Are Ours

All Views Are Welcome—Provided They Are Ours

Social justice activism is a religion in that it provides a set of beliefs. These beliefs are to be accepted unquestioningly, and a common language develops between the people involved by which they may identify one another and interrogate and expel heretics.

December 26, 2022
Falsehoods, Persecution, and Forgiveness

Falsehoods, Persecution, and Forgiveness

Pell’s Prison Journal provides an inspiring example of how to endure attacks while loving our persecutors. Perhaps his serene approach can show our post-Christian civilization the beauty of Christian love and forgiveness.

December 22, 2022
A Manifesto of Architectural Hope

A Manifesto of Architectural Hope

Alain de Botton’s book tells us that we can and should regain hope about the future of our homes and cities. Architecture has been in a sad state in the West for many decades, but there are also glimmers of promise.

December 21, 2022
Literature that Defied the Nazi Regime

Literature that Defied the Nazi Regime

Scholdt pays tribute to both the aesthetic achievements and the courage of writers who were persecuted and ostracized during the Nazi era. He also considers the significance of their resistance in the Nazi years for our own tumultuous times.

December 19, 2022
More Kicks to Arthur Bryant’s Corpse

More Kicks to Arthur Bryant’s Corpse

Through scarcely credible naïveté, Robinson seems to believe that he has disposed of Bryant’s ethical pretensions. His hubris calls to mind those self-destructive British Labour parliamentarians who elicited the jibe that, when granted a choice of weapons, they always selected boomerangs.

December 18, 2022
A Dangerous Empire

A Dangerous Empire

Nothing seems wrong with a discerning use of Netflix. But the company’s final goals, Chanot wishes to remind us, are anything but harmless and are bound to destroy the virtues we care to preserve within our families.

December 14, 2022