New Columbia Review

S uppose you are a Christian —in the absolute loosest sense of the word— and you come upon a man who professes that he does not believe in God.  You may be dismayed and you may try and think of something clever to gently nudge him in the proper direction of being a theist.  You quickly revert back to a simple wager in that if one dies believing in God, they will be saved; but if one dies not believing in God, they will be damned.  You then make the case that it is better to risk dying and being wrong about God's existence, than it is to risk eternal damnation.  You have used a simplified and convincing argument known as 'The Bet', or, Pascal's Wager. You, being clever, think that you have the atheist stuck in a simple dilemma where the only pragmatic and reasonable choice is to believe in God.  For to believe in God, is to potentially gain the rewards of eternal happiness and life; whereas the risk in the alternative is damnation.  However, you have mad...

O ver the course of fine literature none cuts opinions down so fine a line and construes interpretations such as Vladimir Nabokov's famous work Lolita .  This is one of those novels that many have an opinion whether or not they have actually taken the time to devour this literary masterpiece.  Simply put, Lolita is one of the most disturbingly beautiful novels America has to offer in the realms of contemporary literature.  Beautiful not necessarily in what it tries to say —for the topic is revolting— but in how it goes about saying it.  Reading such eloquent, but easily readable English, one would be shocked to find that English is a second language for this Russian-American author; yet for Mr. Nabokov, he found it sadly to be 'second-rate' to his much preferred and beloved "governess of Saint Petersburg."   Lolita was not his first English novel, but it most certainly was the novel that vaulted him into literary status among the Anglo-sphere. With it,...

I t should come as no surprise to anyone that the recent Oscars has done very little but to point out the absurdity of what one of America's cults has depressingly come to.  Hollywood, that once glittering wonder of the world, complete with its glitz and glamour, full of starlets and stars, our role-models, priests and priestesses, has now shown its tarnish and its mask has been pulled off.  The low ratings of this most recent and much anticipated 90 th Academy Awards show has shown that very few Americans are tuning in to gaze upon the faces of their Aphrodites and Adonises, and dream dreams of silver screens and golden awards. One may wonder why it is that Americans still obsess over their sports and athletic heroes, whom they revere as the Romans once revered the gladiators, or the Greeks revered the wrestlers, but no longer find interest in the thespians.  The only answer that I could find is that the allure of Hollywood has been long dead and due to this fact, a...