After all the buildup, the scandals and the controversies – How stripped down would the affair be? Would Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attend? Would people take the oath of allegiance? – the coronation of King Charles III Saturday, May 6, at Westminster Abbey in London emphasized the profoundly religious aspect of the ceremony. Like a baptism or confirmation – with its special rituals, symbols, clothing and music – the coronation underscored the covenant between an individual and God, which in this case must also be a covenant between a king and his people, who are going through a tough time.
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Read MoreBoris Johnson and his Conservative Party won big in the United Kingdom’s recent election, establishing a clear path — or more precisely, a clearer path — to Brexit Jan. 31. Amid all the questions of winners (the Tories) and losers (the Labour Party, its unpalatable former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and quite possibly the British worker, London as world financial capital, immigrants, globalism, Scotland, the Irish backstop), was the notion that the Conservatives succeeded because of Johnson’s Trumpian charisma, which he damped down for the occasion by corralling his usual hijinks.
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Read MoreThe year 2017 is not quite half over but it’s already shaping up to be an annus horribilus, to borrow from Queen Elizabeth II. If the trend continues, we may look back on this past week as one of the most miserable of a miserable year.
The London fire, the Congressional shooting, the Michelle Carter case, the latest developments in Russiagate all point to a ruinous selfishness. ...
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Read More“These are the times that try men’s souls,” the great American patriot Thomas Paine wrote. We could use the strength of Paine and people like him at this moment.
Yesterday’s terrorist attack in London – which left seven dead and dozens wounded, including 21 critically – was not merely a momentary victory for the terrorists. It was a win for the strongmen of the world like President Donald J. Trump, whose response to them is more hatred and more irrational violence. Notice I wrote, “irrational violence.” ...
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Read MoreReading about the dead and the wounded in the terrorist attack on London’s Westminster Bridge – from 10 nations and all walks of life – put me in mind once more of Thornton Wilder’s beloved novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”
It tells the story of five people in 18th-century Peru who die while crossing a footbridge that collapses. A witness who was about to cross, a Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper, is assigned to investigate the tragedy. ...
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Read MoreWhen I was a child, one of my favorite books was Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” set against the backdrop of revolutionary Paris and its archrival, London.
It’s a story about many different kinds of rivals and doubles, chiefly Charles Darnay, who’s noble in every sense of the word but finds himself paying for the aristocratic sins of his family, and Sydney Carton, the ne’er-do-well English barrister who nonetheless is capable of great courage and love.
Both men are in love with Lucie Manette, the daughter of a doctor whose mind has been ravaged by his imprisonment in Paris. Darnay wins her but Carton, who could be his twin, remains devoted. And when Darnay is unjustly imprisoned by revolutionaries and condemned to the guillotine, Carton hits on a plan to change places with him. But first he undergoes some soul-searching, wandering the streets of Paris. He takes comfort in the biblical words he once heard at a funeral:
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whoever so liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
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Read MoreRecently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”
The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? Read more
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