One of my sons is reading Jack London's "To Build a Fire" for school this week. Not having ever read it myself, I decided to do so, despite my deep antipathy to the "To [Infinitive]" form of scriptorial denomination. Hoo boy, I'm glad I did. What a terrifying tour de...

Time for "Melanchthon Monday"! Last week I introduced a poem by Melanchthon's friend, Joachim Camerarius. Here is the poem again, first in Latin: In tenebris nostrae, et densa caligine mentis,Cum nihil est toto pectore consilii,Turbati erigimus Deus ad te lumina...

Time for another “Melanchthon Monday”!  Now, you may be surprised, given that today’s poem is not (um) by Melanchthon. But wait! It still works! However, you won’t see just how well it works until a future installment.  Our poem for this week, while it is...

August 10 marks the commemoration of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, burned alive on the gridiron in the third century. He is the subject of a fascinating and frequently macabre and defiant poem of Prudentius in the Peristephanon. (A professor of mine in graduate...

For today’s installment of “Melanchthon Mondays” has us moving from secular back to sacred matters. The following poem is one of several prayers in verse found among Melanchthon’s poetry. The poem consists of only four lines of elegiac couplets, in which Christ is...

I know, I know--I still owe one more post on Burke eviscerating fantasist utopian "justice" lunatics. I'm saving up my energy for that one. In the meantime, I've also been reading William Hazlitt's wonderful sketch of Burke in Political Essays, with Sketches of Public...

This one’s for the John Wayne fans. Our poem for today’s edition of “Melanchthon Mondays” is on a similar theme to last week’s, but this time no particular poet is named.  Once again, the poem is in elegiac couplets, and once again I’ve tried to imitate them in...

The grave of John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome famously reads, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." While doing some prep for a class this fall, I chanced to read Catullus 70 and was reminded of Keats's grave: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere...

Last time, we saw Edmund Burke's claim that it was unjust to punish a man for a name to which he happens to be attached, or, rather, which happens to be attached to him. "It is not very just," he says, to exact vengeance on a person because of his natural ancestors;...

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here is Edmund Burke on the injustice of punishing men for the crimes of their predecessors. Burke, as a Christian thinker, knew that to do so was a product of the rationalism (which is, for that reason, irrational) of an "enlightened...