Dante lived long before America existed and had no knowledge of the difficult and troublesome history regarding race that has plagued this continent since slavery came to the New World. However, his Divine Comedy can be read as a spiritual journey illustrating the deeply Catholic principle that sin necessitates confession and repentance. In this context, Dante speaks powerfully to the issue of race in America. Nations, like individuals, must reckon with their sins in order to move on to their future in healing and in hope. False arguments that America must recover its “greatness” without a deep and national repentance for the sins of slavery and of racism in general miss the mark spiritually. Just as Dante had to face his own personal sins and failures before moving on from the end of Purgatory into Paradise, America needs to face its sins, both confessing and repenting of them.

Wagner and Miles, the primary servants in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, derive their function and identity from their masters. Since both Faustus and Bacon are magicians, their servants are influenced by contact with magic. Although they are less significant figures than the protagonists, the servants help to determine the outcome of their respective plays. By examining Wagner and Miles as servants of both their masters and of magic itself, we can see how Faustus and Bacon fail as magicians, as masters of magic. In comparing the “good” servant, Wagner, whose master is overcome by magic, to the “bad” servant, Miles, whose master renounces magic, we can arrive at an understanding of true service and its relationship to magic.

This essay is a close reading of A River Runs Through It taking Maclean’s opening line, “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing” is a guide to three elements in the novel: biblical siblings in the Old and New Testament as prototypes of Norman and Paul, the futile efforts of both to be brother’s and brother’s-in-law keepers and fly fishing as curative and restorative remedy.

Before we bring a moral verdict on Thomas Becket’s progress as an evolved character, it will help to see the rationale of non-attachment in the light of verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. The passages on knowing-not, knowing, and action/suffering are re-examined here. All by himself, Thomas knows little. What he would know differently, both of/ for himself and others, requires that he seek his dharma by discovering how false or illusory his knowledge has been, and why. This essay tries to capture the pedagogic logic of learning what we know and what we do not. Learning by reciprocal exchange becomes a model for those who are averse to arguing from results. Intertexts like W. B. Yeats’s “Vacillation” and E. M. Forster’s “Hymn Before Action” help them read the Archbishop’s Christmas sermon all afresh. This essay concludes by arguing how Eliot himself found dramatic poetry an ideal vehicle for presenting action precisely the way the Gita exhorts us.