Deus Caritas Est

Gunshots roaring, the world covered by blood and death, all alone. Wondering if loved ones are still alive, in starvation, or being tortured. Wondering if the same fate will befall the frail adolescent body of yours. Imagine being drafted for the military at the age of thirteen and going off to war. This is an unfortunate reality for many children in certain countries. Child soldiering has become a way of war. This horrendous practice of exploiting children is caused by the need to economically…

The Kite-Runner – Memoir Project – Written Portion JOURNAL PROMPT NO. 1 What are your opinions on war? War is an indicator of failure. On a personal level, it’s a sign of people not being able to express rage, deception, sorrow or disillusionment in a constructive way. It also can be a means to take advantage of a situation, like with war over petrol, over a territory, over a spice trade, over mineral resources, over the supremacy on an indigenous people, and on and on. I link war to a kind of…

Tim O'Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, eloquently (NR) demonstrates the theme of ‘beauty in horror’. The novel emphasizes this theme through the underlying foil between beauty and atrocities that are not uncommon in war stories. O'Brien focuses on the imagery of these events as well as the tone to illustrate the difficulties that soldiers are exposed to and how they have been conditioned to their situation to no longer see the horror in these horrific events rather start seeing them as…

The job of the memoirist is to choose a purpose and decide which details to include in the writing that best convey that purpose. Ishmael Beah’s purpose for writing A Long Way Gone was to dispel the notion that war and violence are romantic. In his vivid testament as a former child soldier, Beah examines how war erodes consideration and thoughtfulness for others. He examines a loss of innocence that hopefully the reader won’t have to experience. He describes a world in which adults pray on the…

War has many different concepts and ideas. The Red Badge of Courage seems to express most of these themes of war. The difficulties of war, the toll war takes on soldiers, rigorous battles, and a triumph of an army are only some of the themes in Stephen Crane’s novel. All these themes make it feel so diverse and interesting. Yet, it does not go in depth on the emotions of the soldiers, which is very important. A soldier’s psychological state greatly affects their performance on the field. If a…

Dictionary.com defines dark humor as “a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but somehow comic.” In Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, this concept of dark humor is used throughout to convey the actuality of war. By examining all aspects of war, Vonnegut approaches the cruelty of war from a variety of different perspectives in order to craft one, unified thesis about the meaning of war. Kurt…

throughout war. The words he employs display the harshness of war, conveying feelings of sadness and a state of uneasy. The ideas surrounding war are further examined in three different pieces of work; “The War Prayer” by Mark Twain, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, and “Elusive Bargain” by Andrew J. Bacevich. The authors present war as holy and glorious, which in turn, becomes a harsh reality for the civilians who enter into war and discover the destruction and horror.…

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die," said Herbert Hoover, 31st president of the United States. This quote that is still relevant today, is referring to the situations in countries such as the ones in Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are in today. The situations in these two books, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, are similar to the ones of these countries. The main characters, Ishmael Beah and Katniss Everdeen, are kids in a…

In Carl Sandburg’s Grass the ideology of how grass covers all evil in the world is portrayed. In the poem the speaker talks about the many wars in the history of the world, and how they are all covered up by the grass. The in lines two and six, “Shovel them under and let me work” is repeated showing how the speaker (the grass) covers up war by growing over the bodies of those lost in the war. Towards the end of the poem the speaker mentions how the passengers do not know where they are. This is…

throughout human history contained one common element. Death. In World War II, it was a pure and noble custom to sacrifice a loving son to war. However, those who survived realized how horrific and petrifying battle becomes. In the poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen, war is translated through the eyes of the unfortunate sons that were overwhelmed during their struggles at war. Owen distributes the elements of diction, imagery, and figurative language to effectively express the emotions…