Category Archives: The Gospel of the Kingdom

MERCURY THEATER CHICAGO FINDS GOLD IN BIG RIVER

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Those seven words from chapter 31 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are among the most memorable in American literature. At this point in the novel, Huck Finn has just realized the con artists, the  Duke and Dauphin, have betrayed the runaway slave Jim and sold […]

May 14, 2023 – 1:04 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Books, from Paul, History, Music, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on MERCURY THEATER CHICAGO FINDS GOLD IN BIG RIVER

Handel’s JEPHTHA: Being Right in One’s Own Eyes: The Music of the Baroque’s Electrifying Performance

The most commonly used word to describe Georg Friedrich Handel’s 1752 oratorio Jephtha is “dark”. And the word has nothing to do with the fact that the composer was going blind as he was composing. Jephtha, Handel’s last oratorio, is his most troubling masterpiece. The work contemplates the often inscrutable role of the divine in […]

September 20, 2022 – 9:38 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Poetry, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Handel’s JEPHTHA: Being Right in One’s Own Eyes: The Music of the Baroque’s Electrifying Performance

IRISH THEATRE OF CHICAGO: MOLLY SWEENEY – HAVING EYES BUT NOT SEEING

Molly Sweeney (1994), presented by the Irish Theatre of Chicago at the Chopin Theatre, is the second of two plays (the other is The Faith Healer (1979),  in which the great Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-2015) explores the subjects of religion and science, faith and disappointment, and seeing and understanding. Healing is the topic of […]

May 1, 2022 – 4:55 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Quotations, Science, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on IRISH THEATRE OF CHICAGO: MOLLY SWEENEY – HAVING EYES BUT NOT SEEING

CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE’S AS YOU LIKE IT: NON-STOP JOY

In the early 1970s countless undergraduate and graduate stage directing students had the “happy idea” of setting Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a then new and en vogue  Back-to-Nature commune,  populated mostly by trust fund baby revolutionaries fleeing Richard Nixon’s America. Arden was a Vermont ashram, the center of the American counterculture, home to […]

October 31, 2021 – 6:47 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE’S AS YOU LIKE IT: NON-STOP JOY

NEW WEBSITE: THE S YMBOLIC WORLD- Chesterton for the 21st Century

                  G.K. Chesterton called them  fairy tales. They inspired C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. SOME solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war […]

May 28, 2020 – 10:42 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Art, Books, Current Events, from Paul, History, Media, Men and Women, Movies, Music, Opera, Poetry, Quotations, Science, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology, Uncategorized, Web Sites | Comments Off on NEW WEBSITE: THE S YMBOLIC WORLD- Chesterton for the 21st Century