Author: Robert Llizo
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Tirso de Molina's Tragic Rake
Everyone has his or her notion of what constitutes a relaxing evening. For me, among other things, it is an occasional trip to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles to watch and experience an operatic performance. This weekend, neither time nor finances permitted such a venture, so I got a DVD version of Mozart’s…
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Charles Coulombe on "The Decline and Fall of the Anglo Empire"
Mr. Coulombe’s latest offering on Taki’s Magazine takes as its starting point the recent bill signed into law by our “undead” governor and moves on to explore a more fundamental issue about illegal immigration: the culture of “self-indulgence and sloth” espoused by the Anglo elite. In the words of the new Archbishop of Los Angeles:…
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The Battle of Roncesvalles: History and Legend
Today, August 15, marks the 1,233rd anniversary of the Battle of Roncesvalles, a pitch battle fought by a contingent of Charlemagne’s army led by Roland, the prefect of the Breton March, against a Basque attack on the Roncesvalles pass while Roland’s men were on the retreat. This battle gave birth, about four-hundred years later, to…
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Archduke Otto von Habsburg: A Belated Eulogy
It has been one month since the passing of one of my greatest heroes of the twentieth century. I heard of his passing from my friend Charles Coulombe when I rang him that day, July 4. Both of us agreed that he had been a salient influence in our lives from childhood. He had been…
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Passion and Resurrection: Reflections on the Death of a Friendship and the Death of a Friend
(I wrote this piece a year ago, and since then, there has been a reconciliation with the friend in question, though this friend lives now a half a world away. I publish it as it is) there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality As I write this piece I…
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Royal Duty: The King Behind the Speech
St. Joseph, spouse of the Virgin Mary and Foster-Father of Christ, has always fascinated me. He comes on the scene, plays his role, and then is never mentioned again in the gospel narratives. He is a man who is called to do one task, difficult, for sure, but one that does not win him any…
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Bach as Theologian
I couldn’t let the 326th birthday of the great Kappelmeister go by without some short reflection on my favorite choral piece, the great St. Matthew Passion. As a devout Lutheran, Bach heavily meditated on the passion of Christ, influenced heavily by Martin Luther’s theology of the cross. For Luther, Christ as the “suffering servant” is…
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Jews and Arabs in Search of Wisdom: Two Book Reviews
Scholars and students who have worked their way through Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s and Oliver Leaman’s masterfully edited work, A History of Islamic Philosophy (Routledge, 2001) will, if they had bother to read the two introductions by Nasr and Leaman respectively, come away with an appreciation for how difficult it was to define the parameters of…
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Don Quixote’s Last Laugh
One of the most frustrating things about being a professor in a Great Books program is that there are so many books that can, and indeed should, be in any possible curriculum, but given the constraints related to time and space that we have to deal with in the Torrey Honors Institute, some of these…
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Patriotism Firmly Rooted in Mid-Air
One morning last week, as I was driving to the Biola campus to teach a session on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, I came across two vehicles with two very different sets of bumper stickers. One said “God Bless the World,” and the other, displaying his patriotism for all to see, featured a proud portrayal of the…