Copyright 2012 Thomas Hibbs Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:40:03 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Thomas Hibbs :: Writings http://www.thomashibbs.org tshibbs@aol.com (Thomas Hibbs) webmaster@pundicity.com en-us http://www.thomashibbs.org/9935/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-part-2 Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EST There has never been anything quite like J. K Rowling's Harry Potter, the hero of a hugely popular series of seven books followed by a successful set of eight movies. The decision to split the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two... http://www.thomashibbs.org/10025/tree-of-life Tue, 5 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EST A young son in Terrence Malick's Tree of Life asks his mother, "Tell us a story from before we can remember." Malick begins his story even earlier by telling the story from before we can remember. With visually arresting imagery and a mesmerizing musical... http://www.thomashibbs.org/9796/midnight-in-paris Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:00:00 EST Woody Allen's new film, Midnight in Paris, is a marked improvement over recent failures such as Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which Allen indulged in strident liberal politics and incoherent nihilistic musings. Although its... http://www.thomashibbs.org/8981/of-gods-and-men Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men is a French-language film based on the true story of the martyrdom of Catholic monks in Algiers in the 1990s. The Cistercian monks, who had lived peaceably serving a mostly Muslim community, became trapped in the battle... http://www.thomashibbs.org/8980/the-adjustment-bureau Fri, 4 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST The new film The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by George Nolfi, features Matt Damon as David Norris, a politician whose chance encounter with Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) complicates not only his career ambitions but his naïve assumptions about... http://www.thomashibbs.org/8488/the-tempest Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:00:00 EST More famous for her Broadway productions of The Lion King and the upcoming Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark than for films such as Titus, Frida, and Across the Universe, Julie Taymor has brought a new version of Shakespeare's The Tempest to the screen. As... http://www.thomashibbs.org/8046/stanley-cavell-philosophical-improvisations Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:00:00 EST In God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, the latest in a number of recent books critical of the modern research university, the influential Irish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7902/caravaggio-sacramental-realism Sat, 1 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST In the 1986 film Caravaggio, the director Derek Jarman takes the turbulent life of a gifted artist as an occasion to reinvent him as a lascivious, romantic-existentialist anti-hero. An irascible man, whose public fortune waxed and waned, who spent much... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7212/avatar Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST James Cameron's record-shattering film Avatar is being released on DVD today. Today is not a Tuesday, the day DVDs normally hit the stores, but a Thursday, to coincide with the 40th annual Earth Day: Avatar highlights the threats posed by an advanced,... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7188/between-athens-and-jerusalem Thu, 8 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST In a 1932 letter Leo Strauss wrote, "I cannot believe and . . . therefore I search for a possibility to live without faith." That search, which began in the 1920s, led him from contemporary theological debates and the modern liberal critique of religion... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7187/ralph-mcinerny-1929-2010 Wed, 1 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST According to Aristotle, is the performance of virtuous acts with ease and delight. On that basis, as well as others, Ralph McInerny was a remarkably virtuous man. One of Ralph's most beautiful books is entitled The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7186/oscars-parochial-world Mon, 8 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education, an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how he is taking her to visit his old professor, C.S. Lewis. Although Lewis does not figure further... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7185/children-of-lesser-gods Wed, 3 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST Woody Allen's Whatever Works, a serious contender for worst movie of 2009, is noteworthy mostly as a disastrous attempt to channel Allen's humor through the caustic verbiage of the increasingly unfunny Larry David. But the problem is deeper than casting.... http://www.thomashibbs.org/6685/up-in-the-air Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST Pascal once observed that, in the absence of a framing purpose for human life, the best life was one with access to a host of diversions. Moving its denizens from one diversion to another, modern society would seem to have discovered the key to life in... http://www.thomashibbs.org/7184/the-modern-philosophical-revolution Mon, 1 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST CHARLES TAYLOR ONCE lamented that, on the topic of modernity, scholars seem divided into two camps: knockers and boosters. In The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, David Walsh, longtime professor of political science at the...