AS DIFFICULT AS it is to learn to trust a mentor, it is even more arduous to break down our self suspicion. Do we have what it takes to break free of the entanglements of the Dark Wood - to melt with feeling-intellect the icy encrustations of Hell that keep us paralyzed in our self defeating patterns? We stare eyeball to eyeball at the antagonist within, sizing up our character and our chances of restoration.
MY SON, SEAN, says he is suspicious of fictional accounts of the life of Christ. I agree with him. There are considerable emotional and philosophical agendas shadowing the Jesus of film, art or literature. That's true of popular treatments like Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar; literary reconstructions like King Jesus by Robert Graves, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kanzanzakis, and The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer, but also, the so-called assure results of scholarship like Crossan's Jesus the Revolutionary. Treatments of Jesus leave me wondering whose Jesus the writer is talking about?
Mary Shelley's work is symbolic. Symbols are meant to be explored with ever increasing depth rather than simply defined. What you envision as the central theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus will likely be governed by the interpretive lens you view the novel with rather than some unquestionable meaning revealed by the text itself. Instead of advocating any one theme, I would suggest that you explore your critical and imaginative abilities so that you can see the text in a multitude of ways. In this manner you will be attempting to see the most it can mean
Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug emphasizes the chasm between our perceptions and reality. Poe's ghoulish tone is not merely horror for the "gross out", as Stephen King calls it. The gothic elements in Poe serve the higher purpose of transforming our consciousness. One of the tell-tale signs of a Poe story is that truth is not easily accessible. When we confront reality it does not conform to our expectations. A metamorphosis, in the normal way of seeing things, takes place when we learn to question not only our general perceptions of subject but our own cherished convictions. Poe's horror supplies
THE USE OF biography needs to be seen in light of our lenses. For instance, if I put on the lens which admires genius and passionate yearning, I can be quite encouraged when I see the ambiguity of the person I am striving to understand. Right now I am listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67. While I am listening I can easily forgive his human foibles (even though my forgiveness is not necessarily important to Ludgy). This type of lens I compare with being longsighted. The stuff up close, the personal stuff, is blurred
Poe meticulously details, from the opening paragraph through to the last, the development of the narrator's initial uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel to Usher's terrors (Wilbur p. 91). - The narrator attributes his fantasy to his subjective perceptions. We the readers never do know what is real, what is a dream or the product of mutual hysteria. "Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building" (Selected Works p. 200). - There is a split consciousness in the narrator's mind between
During this second night on Origen we explored his theme of warfare and his allegorical approach to reading. 1) Origen's third theme of warfare. He has an interesting twist on this idea that is linked to being a martyr. He feels we are called first to an inner war - to fight that which brings conflict within our soul. Having fortified our character, we are called to change the world through active non-resistance. So how do we fortify our character, you may ask? Origen says through training. He believed that God acts as a divine goldsmith who hammers us into