Is everything going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Into the crapper? Or is life getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What, exactly, does your handbasket look like? The older I get the more interested I am in people’s convictions about the directionality of culture.…

Having written most recently about the late actor Paul Scofield, and his rendering of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, I can’t help but do a little “compare and contrast” with the Showtime series, The Tudors, now in its second season. Of course, it’s not a fair match-up: Michael Hirst,…

Other bloggers here at Good Letters seem to be establishing various narrative arcs—about music, fiction, etc. Well, it seems that I’m specializing in obituaries, this being my third in a row. Perhaps it’s my age, but in recent weeks I’ve felt the loss of several greats. Today I celebrate the great British actor, Paul Scofield,…

Within just a few weeks of each other, America has lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley, Jr. and E. Victor Milione—both seminal figures in the modern revival of political and intellectual conservatism. It may seem odd that in a blog devoted to the relationship between art and faith that I would choose to…

When I first contacted John Dillenberger I was not quite thirty years old and he was not quite seventy. He was a former seminary president and distinguished theologian, with nearly a dozen books to his credit. I was…a guy who wanted to start a journal. I sent off a letter to Dillenberger with a certain…