June 27th, 2007
In our last episode, we concluded our sundry Snape theories. Now to another significant mystery in the Harry Potter books: the matter of Horcruxes.
We know that Horcruxes are objects (or perhaps creatures) in which an evil wizard has placed a piece of his soul in order to extend his life unnaturally. This evil magic apparently [...]
June 27th, 2007
More Harry Potter theories anon, but I simply had to draw your attention to one of the most incisive book reviews I’ve ever read, by Eugene McCarraher, about Christopher Hitchens’ entry in the current anti-religion publishing fad.
Here’s an excerpt, after commenting on Hitchens’ reputation as a brilliant writer and fearless critic:
…as Mark Twain once mused, [...]
June 24th, 2007
Okay, so we’ve declared Snape a hero…so how in the dickens does Clan Murphy explain the ending of Book 6 and Snape’s apparent murder of Dumbledore?
Again, potential SPOILER ALERTS. We will be mentioning several incidents occuring in books 1 - 6, and if we happen to prophecy correctly about events in Book 7…so it goes.
So [...]
June 23rd, 2007
The arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is less than a month away, and I promised our faithful readers that I would share what Clan Murphy thinks about how this amazing series will, or should, end. So here’s our first offering in the series.
Now, we have no inside information, mind you, and hough [...]
June 21st, 2007
here’s an article in today’s Catholic World News reporting that an Italian archeologist believes that the cup Christ used at the Last Supper may be buried beneath the walls of one of the seven great Roman Italian basilicas, St. Lawrence Outside the Walls.
Dan and I visited there as part of our pilgrimage to Rome in [...]
Debra Murphy on Reviving Christianity’s Artistic Tradition
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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
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The concentration resulting fom a framework of theology and philosophy, [T.S. Eliot] says, is one of the reasons ‘why Dante is a classic and Blake only a poet of genius.’ The intellectual disorder of the nineteenth century gave the poet no such system, indeed it imposed upon him the necessity of being at once an artist and an original speculative thinker—an impossible combination. Thus the effort to construct for himself a workable plan out of the odds and ends of the wreckage of philosophical systems not infrequently resulted in grotesque and unsteady structures, the early collapse of which left him a prey to despair and frustration.
— Calvert Alexander, SJ