Symbolic landscapes shift during the years. For a century or more, starting perhaps with Mark Twain, American writers have looked to the South as a metaphor for failed expectations and ruinous nostalgia. William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Walker Percy and

God is a multiple choice quiz. Which God will we choose? One turns nosy old women into pillars of salt, slips serpents down the togas of Egyptians and sets Satan loose on his best friend just to see how he will stand up under the boils and windy advice of neighbors. Another rains down Wonder Bread i

In 1970 at the age of 56 Alec Guinness by then one of the best-known character actors in the world sat for a formal portrait Michael Noakes the artist recognized the overwhelming challenge of the task ldquo How does one paint what lies beneath the surface of the skin rdquo asks biographer

In October 1927, with the release of “The Jazz Singer,” sound movies became commercially viable. In October 1929 the stock market crashed. Strange as it seems, the two events are closely related in cultural history. During the final two years of the boom, the movie industry had the money

Imagine one of those unspeakably beautiful September mornings in New York, with sunlight shouldering its way across the East River, nudging the bridges and skyscrapers and striding into the concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan. The air itself energizes office workers pouring into Manhattan from Queen

‘Is there any place on campus where they recite the Liturgy of the Hours?” The two undergraduates who popped into the sacristy after one of those tiny mid-morning, midweek gatherings for Eucharist in a university chapel took me by surprise. Why would two young women want to squeeze one m

Not long ago a distant cousin, a genealogy buff, sent me an antique clipping from a local paper about a possible ancestor on trial for murder. In the labor wars of the 19th century, scabs did not have much longevity in the Irish factory towns of the Middle West. This long-forgotten enforcer simply p

The rituals of the suburban cocktail party play out predictably. Sometime during the late afternoon, amid the gleaming borrowed chafing dishes and the fluttering corporate wives, one of the guests, grown progressively less inhibited through drink, raises a glass to toast the beautiful hostess. She s

Road to Perdition begins and ends with a young boy looking out over Lake Michigan. His voice-over narration in the opening shot leads the way to the lengthy flashback that provides the story line of the film. The camera, however, stares out over the faceless waters with him, as though pondering his

Those of us of a certain age can sympathize with poor Cecily (Reese Witherspoon), a prisoner of grammar lessons taught by the indefatigable and assertively dull Miss Prism (Anna Massey). Oscar Wilde certainly did, when he put her in The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet those tedious days of Latin an