The rabbis talking with the twelve-year-old Jesus about the Torah must have thought that he was a child prodigy.

The desert, Balzac once declared, holds everything and nothing for God is there, and man is not.

World-famous as a capital of fashion and design, Milan, Italy's second city, has a more modest reputation for cultural heritage.

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, beauty would have been the answer.

A number of readers have written to me about the essay I wrote on the failure to develop a satisfactory philosophy of music, asking where they could find further information.

Von Balthasar's was no purely theoretical preoccupation with beauty. The award in 1987 of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Prize in Innsbruck was the rounding off of a life whose secret passion had been music.