Matthew Arnold

Recent

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

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What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

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Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

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He’s the Guy

Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;

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Random

Just Win Baby

If Tim Tebow never plays another down as an NFL Quarterback it won’t be because he can’t. It will be because they say he can’t. I don’t even say “because they think he can’t,” since thinking — actually assessing the data they have in front of them — hasn’t been much involved here. And the bottom line

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Nothing in Common

. [you are not here]   It’s not going to be easy. Thinking of nothing takes longer than one might expect. [In]famously ‘a show about nothing’ Seinfeld ’twas really about nothingness. Nothingness is nihilism and is to the nothing of creation as ‘a live coal dropped in the sea‘. Ours is the God whose ‘strength is

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He Built That

They say of Jim Brown — When he got to the end zone he acted like he’d been there before. They don’t say this of those who make it there today. There’s something to be said for this, and Vince Lombardi said it — If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with

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People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

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