Algis Valiunas

Opera has traditionally had little interest in Christian orthodoxy. So when composer Francis Poulenc wrote his masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites, the work’s celebration of heroic piety defied the secular spirit of the art form. Continue Reading »

Seen from our enlightened vantage, Nana might well seem the original torchbearer of all the brave new freedoms. In the end, however, uncharitable Nature undoes her. Continue Reading »

My brother Peter was a wondrous boy, the youngest, brightest, and bounciest of three kids: IQ 165, boundless curiosity, confidence, and mental energy, bold in the best sense, and less than optimally protective of life and limb, fearing neither God nor man. A school exercise he wrote when he was five . . . . Continue Reading »

Aldous Huxley was in certain respects a modern disenchanted intellectual, and he had no use for actual demons; but there are persons as serious and sane as he was who can state with authority that demons and demonic possession are real. Continue Reading »

When a man proclaims nature malignant in all its parts and professes to hate life itself, one’s first suspicion is that something is profoundly wrong with him. The man’s grievance against creation must be the effect of some personal deficiency in body or soul or both, rather than a sound . . . . Continue Reading »

Small wars, the kind that pit a superpower against an apparently overmatched enemy, are easy to slip into and can be hard to get out of. But it need not always be so. The British in their imperial magnificence at the turn of the twentieth century fought wars against Islamic fanatics on the northwest . . . . Continue Reading »

“Keeping Christmas well” entails rather more than Dickensian high spirits and well wishing to all comers. Continue Reading »

In the popular understanding of Christmas, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella looms large. A Christmas Carol seems to represent not only Christmassy warmth, fellowship, and cheer, but the very essence of Christian practice. At the end, Ebenezer Scrooge, the old skinflint, is redeemed by an . . . . Continue Reading »

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” So begins a famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, one that was often taught to schoolchildren back when memorizing poetry was part of education. The poet comes upon “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” The flowers flutter and dance before him, their . . . . Continue Reading »

The Russian soul. The phrase serves as shorthand for Russia’s national character, after the manner of American innocence, French arrogance, Italian dolce far niente, and what used to be the English stiff upper lip. Russians are reputed to feel more than the rest of us do, think deep thoughts . . . . Continue Reading »