The Philosophical Optimist

              There’s nothing like binge-watching your favorite franchise to help you see the larger patterns in the weave, and having just recently achieved one of my more minor lifetime reading goals of absorbing all of Shakespeare by binging a large number of Shakespearean film adaptations, I find myself itching to share with someone some of my observations.   Since the day I write this is the Fourth of July, it seems appropriate to begin with observations that connect Shakespeare to us here in America, even, more specifically, us here in the American South.             It should not surprise anyone that Shakespeare’s English shares certain properties with English here in the American South, given that the history of the South begins in his lifetime.   The very first of the Colonies was, after all, Virginia, named in honor of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabe...

  "Of course we will have fascism in America, but we will call it democracy.”—a prophecy attributed to Louisiana governor Huey Long by literary scholar Harold Bloom   “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?”—St. James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem, brother of Jesus called the Christ (James 2.15-16)   “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?   My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue [only], but in deed and in truth.”—St. John the Theologian, I John   3.17-18   “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic…”—John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, in a letter               Not long ago, I had an epiphany, l...