Essays

The Isla Vista mass murder was a preventable tragedy. It was the destruction of innocent life without need or reason. It is proof, as if more proof were needed, that we are past the time to break the nexus between guns, murder, and mental illness.

History is the story of the struggle of the psychologically normal majority of humanity to free ourselves from the tyranny of a psychologically disordered minority who are marked by their innate propensity for violence and greed.

Part I – Watershed Moments

While we all rightly celebrate the protections afforded free speech by the First Amendment and are thankful, as President Obama said recently at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, "We really are lucky to live in a country where reporters get to give a head of state a hard time on a da

Born in 1899, Lucio Fontana was an artistic child of the early 20th century: after being classically trained as a sculptor in his father's studio, he experimented with the major movements of his youth, including Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism, as he became a painter.

Who said these words? “You just don’t invade another country on a phony pretext in order to assert your interests.”

The time is ripe for Christians to make a major refocus and become serious about the kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus set out to establish and which was the reason for his arrest, trial and execution by Roman officials.

I had the flu when I reread To the Lighthouse, more than 30 years after my first reading, and I was struck in the haze of fever by my frailty in the face of illness and aging and by Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision of life and death and what it all means.

John Nava, one of America's pre-eminent realist artists, is the subject of a small show of twelve portraits -- paintings, monotypes and Jacquard tapestries -- now on view at the Vita Art Center in Ventura.

“Ukraine – his Ukraine – was dead, a corpse. No, it was worse. It was gone. It had disappeared, vanished. It had been extinguished and obliterated by the Russians.

The sensible Joe Nocera is concerned: Apple has lost its creative mojo.

Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Trainand four other novels: 

On Sunday, April 13, the day before Passover, a man named Frazier Glenn Cross, known as Glenn Miller, is alleged to have shot and killed three people outside two Jewish facilities in Overland Park, Kansas.

LeRoy Neiman’s paintings, posters and famed handlebar mustache made him one of the most recognizable artists of our time. 

Next Sunday is Easter.  At 6:30 a.m.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of 24 published and forthcoming books, including Where We Belong, Walk Me Home, When You Were Older, Don’t Let Me Go, When I Found You, and Second Hand Heart. Forthcoming are Take Me With You, and Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition.

In the introduction to his excellent history of modern art, George Heard Hamilton observed that: