Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humor, and indeed taste is what it is all about.

The moral imagination is an enduring source of inspiration that elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption.

I didnt like the part in the restaurant, Hannah, my 6-year-old granddaughter, said. We were leaving a screening of Sonys new animated feature, Open Season, and I was trying to remember any scene in a restaurant.

In A Cry of Stone, the fifth novel in the series Children of the Last Days, Michael O'Brien has done his best work yet. This is a remarkable book.

The crucial issue and the book's great gift is Defoe's account of how a civilization is born. What transforms chaos into cosmos, survivalism into society, is obedience to God.

Michael O'Brien shows how art and artists both reflect and inspire the religious sensibilities of their culture, and if the present nihilistic art is not to lead culture into the sewer, a revival in authentic religious art must arrive quickly.

For several decades now, writes Nobel prize for literature winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their disintegration into a frantic and insidious "novelty."