Anthony G. Cirilla

Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange prides himself on his steady hands and his brilliant mind. A brutal car accident ruins those hands and leaves his mind in a scrambled state of desperation, leading him outside his comfort zone of Western medicine to seek help in Kamar-Taj, a mysterious monastery in Kathmandu. He believes his gambit […]

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Jordan Peterson The unjust stumble over you and are justly chastised. Augustine All I wanted to do was buy my sister the cereal she wanted. My desire was to give her what she desired. So I let her pick out the cereal, and […]

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Jordan Peterson For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. Augustine When Aeneas first lands in Carthage after […]

When 12 Rules for Life hit bookstores in 2018, Jordan Peterson had already captured the imaginations of millions of YouTube viewers, a following that had grown out of his presentation of the psychological philosophy he had developed in his 1999 Maps of Meaning and made accessible in audiovisual form in his recorded classroom lectures. As […]

“Make friends with people who want the best for you.” Jordan Peterson “You, Lord God, lover of souls, show a compassion far purer and freer of mixed motives than ours.” Augustine I had trouble making friends when I was young. Like many kids, I had learned through some tough (for a second grader) experiences a […]

“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.” Peterson “If only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder.” Augustine In Book II of the Aeneid, Aeneas reports an account of the Trojans debating whether to bring the wooden horse left by the Greeks to Poseidon into Troy or not. An intense note of […]

Stand up straight, with your shoulders back. Jordan Peterson But the consolations of your [God’s] mercies upheld me. Augustine I have never liked it when a parent, while scolding a child, demands that eye contact be made during the tongue-lashing. I recall with incredible vividness a time when, as a teenager, my father was reprimanding […]

Let me begin by clarifying that my title is not intended to suggest that I believe my own meditations on these two books are epic. Rather, I wish to suggest that there is, in terms of literary genre, an epic quality to the work of both writers that makes setting them side by side in […]

We left off having discussed the mythopoeic elements of fantasy and recovery in the first part of this discussion, with escape and consolation as the two further effects which Tolkien regards as necessary for a narrative to be deemed a fairy-tale. As we cover these aspects, our goal is to consider how The Nightmare Before […]

In Shazam!, a wizard who holds captive the demons of the Seven Deadly Sins fails to contain them and recruits in desperation Billy Batson, a wayward miscreant who becomes a hero nearly on par with Superman. Shazam’s name is in fact an acronym, the S standing for the wisdom of Solomon. This incorporation of theological […]

As holiday films go, The Nightmare Before Christmas has an iconic status owed in part to its ability to serve double duty as a movie about both Halloween and Christmas. Its eerie but charismatic protagonist, Jack Skellington, serves as a walking memento mori to adults—his self-lauding remarks about his effortless ability to scare grown men […]

When the hero’s identity has been established and he has overcome reluctance to accept his responsibilities, he enters into the dangerous temptations of pride. In the opening voice over of Spider-Man 3 we hear, “It’s me. Peter Parker. Your friendly neighborhood… you know. I’ve come a long way from being the boy who was bit […]

In the previous post, we considered Spider-Man as a type of liturgical hero, who learns the meaning of the proverbial words which guide him into his heroic actions. Because it is an origin story, the original Spider-Man is a relatively complete hero’s journey, which is part of what made it appealing to consider in terms […]

The concept of the hero’s journey posits that a successful story maps its events over key psychological experiences necessary to formation of identity. In formal worship, the structure of the liturgy maps different aspects of communal and personal spiritual identity around the teachings of Christ and the significance of His life. The liturgy is thus […]

Character and plot are, of course, inextricably intertwined, because it is the actions of characters which substantially define plots – even when the plot is profoundly informed by natural disasters, our interest is captivated by the human response to those events. What happens provides the basis from which the character acts and responds, and subsequent […]