Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

Visions of Beauty: Lothlorien and the Power of Beauty

March 23, 2011
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There is something "perilous" about beauty and we are aware at some deep level of intuition or, better yet, at some vague awareness of a moral reality or "calling" that Beauty has within it the power to "change" us at some profound and ontological level of our existence. To follow a "trail' that leads to "the Golden Wood" where one will knowingly encounter Beauty is one that requires courage and calls forth the...

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De-Mythologizing the Search for Self: A Comparison of Four Children’s Fantasy Films

February 23, 2011
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In an age when technology has caught up with our literary imaginations, film makers are faced with many decisions about how to adapt works of fantasy for the silver screen. Since the beginning of story-telling, the quest for something greater than self has permeated our stories, infusing them with elements of the supernatural and the divine. As we seek a greater Other, we are also seeking ourselves and a deeper understanding of what...

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Lewis and Wittgenstein on Facts and Meanings

February 17, 2011
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In a short paper all I can do is whet your appetite, if you have a taste for philosophical investigations. In other words, the best I can do is tease you. By ‘a taste for philosophical investigations', I mean a fascination with certain questions-questions about ultimate meaning, but whose meaning is, ultimately, the question. For example, "What is truth?"; "What is reality?"; "What is knowledge?"; "What is the self?"; "What is meaning?" These are...

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Some Theological Themes Common to C.S. Lewis and John Wesley

November 4, 2010
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Although they lived two centuries apart, C. S. Lewis and John Wesley had much in common. Both were Anglicans associated with Oxford University, but more importantly, both were Evangelicals who took the Christian faith seriously and used similar metaphors to describe faith. For both of them, the things of God, although not visible to the natural eye, could nevertheless be seen with the eyes of faith.

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Beauty Will Save the World – But Which Beauty?

May 18, 2009
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There are some quotations so arresting, so perfect in simplicity, that they never leave the memory. They are honeyed phrases for the mind: "Beauty will save the world," says a prince in Dostoevsky's unfortunately-titled The Idiot. The prince speaks as one having authority: beauty will save the world. Or there is Keats in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn": " ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty'-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all...

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