William Randolph Brafford

Terrence Malick has baffled many of the film critics who once championed him. His detractors call his latest film, Knight of Cups, an “indecipherable mess” or “hard to parse.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times admired Malick’s Tree of Life, but now sounds as if he feels betrayed: “The deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.” Continue Reading »

From Hardcore, directed by Paul Schrader.N.B. A little high-proof language at the end, a lot of high-proof Calvinism . . . . Continue Reading »

I’m a little envious when my friends start swapping stories about their Catholic schooling. There are common, particularly Catholic experiences shared among students at parochial schools whether they grow up in New Jersey, St. Louis, or Seattle. I’ll hear about exactly how beholden to . . . . Continue Reading »

I read Rob Horning’s  New Inquiry  essay on  “Microfame”  with over a decade’s worth of my own blogging and social media use flashing before my eyes. The essay is the kind of theory-laden, semi-aphoristic exposition of culture that it takes me a few reads . . . . Continue Reading »

Two notes: First, the movie under discussion is violent and profane; don’t see it unless you’re comfortable with that. Second,  spoilers follow.  I wish the statement “it comes very late in the movie” were enough to tip everyone off to that, but might as well . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve learned much about logic in the week and a half since my  previous post here . In that little missive, I wrote about a  Peter Kreeft essay  that I had trouble making sense of. Kreeft argued that symbolic logic “has serious social, moral, and even sexual implications, . . . . Continue Reading »

Peter Kreeft has written an article for Touchstone called ” Clashing Symbols: The Loss of Aristotelian Logic & the Social, Moral, & Sexual Consequences .” The thinking goes as follows: Symbolic logic has eclipsed Aristotelian logic in nearly all philosophy textbooks. This is bad . . . . Continue Reading »