Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

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How did a Literary Classic Become a Horror Flick?

Beginning with the first dramatic version of Frankenstein on the London stage in the 1820's until Hollywood began churning out Frankenstein monster films (42 titles at last count), the general spirit of Mary Shelley's original has significantly shifted. What was once a literary classic about parental abandonment of human creations, or about the character distortions that arise when we deny a relationship to the feminine "Other", soon became a narrowly focused presentation of a mad scientist and a grotesque monster. The different mediums of the stage and screen of course had its effect. Playwrights and movie directors, in the hope

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A Review of The Last Dickens

The Last Dickens was a great improvement upon the Poe Shadow; it was more akin to Matthew Pearl's first novel, The Dante Club. Both of these books are extremely well reed and tied to both the text and the tonality of the era in which they are set.

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