Category: Culture
-
10 Christmas Albums You May Not Know
Deal W. Hudson December 4, 2017 I chuckle at my use of “albums” given the remarkable comeback of vinyl recordings, though downloading is actually the medium gradually replacing the CD. Thus, I would advise the reader to check both CD and download formats for the recordings listed below (links to both, where available, are provided). I’ve…
-
Why the Wise Men Followed the Star
Deal W. Hudson December 23, 2017 Wise men have always looked at the heavens with wonder. For them, the night sky filled with stars represents the luminous, the utterly ineffable, the holy. With this sense of overwhelming awe, comes a question: “What lies behind it all?” Wise men don’t ignore this question by burying themselves…
-
Our Trenches, Our Civil War
Deal W. Hudson January 13, 2018 There are no bayonet attacks or cannons firing away into the night, but there are trenches. Take one small town I recently visited in Maryland. “We don’t get invited to any dinner parties, or anything, anymore,” my hostess told me. The street itself is only four short blocks long…
-
Meeting Cervantes — the Man Who Invented the Novel
Deal W. Hudson February 1, 2018 Some books engross you immediately, that’s certainly true of William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016). I was, like many, familiar with Cervantes’s place at the beginning of a literary tradition called the “novel,” but I started the book somewhat suspicious of…
-
The Exquisite Beauty of the Familiar
Deal W. Hudson February 13, 2018 This morning I burst into song: “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day.” My son, Cyprian, now twenty-one, he had not heard me do that in while, and half-smiled, half-frowned. But as I sang the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II and the melody of Richard Rodgers,…
-
Sed Contra: The End of Narcissism
NOVEMBER 1, 2001 DEAL W. HUDSON September 11 was the beginning of a sea change in American life. It’s not the end of the pursuit of happiness, as Christopher Hitchens called it in the Evening Standard, but the end of narcissism. You can see it on the faces of President George W. Bush, Secretary of…
-
Audiobooks, The Word Spoken
By Deal W. Hudson Homer, the first great poet of the West, wasn’t a writer but a performer, with the dining halls of ancient Greece as his stage. Before the advent of written literature, the medium of poetry was dramatic utterance and song. Eyes were no more necessary to the enjoyment of words than they…
-
Passion, Not Prejudice-Mel Gibson’s Christ
By Deal W. Hudson Mel Gibson’s Passion is finally in movie theaters. Now people can see for themselves what all the hubbub is about. Most, I believe, will leave the theater shaken to the core by the terrible beauty of Gibson’s masterpiece. The media-driven expectation of an anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jews will be swept…
-
An Interview with John Cornwell
By Deal W. Hudson John Cornwell is controversial. The best-selling author of Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII has been widely condemned both for the quality of his research and for the alleged heterodoxy of his Catholic faith. In his newest book, Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism,…
-
A Video Interview About Jacques Maritain
In 1993 James and Tyra Arraj interviewed me about the French philosopher Jacques Maritain as part of their excellent documentary, “Understanding Maritain: The Man Who Loved Wisdom.” I was teaching at Fordham University at the time and had been president of the American Maritain Association for several years. The first book I had published was…
Deal W. Hudson 