The Silence of the Lambs

“Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.” This is one of the most compelling quotes from the book, because it begins to show the changes in Elie's mind. His world has been turned upside down, altering his once unquestionable…

Parable of the Sower: Narrative Explanatory Paragraph: In The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler suggests that survival is key. She implies that in the future death is inevitable and survival is a necessary skill to have. Lauren must live outside her community after the big fire. Because she has access to her father’s “library” of books, she is able to read on how to survive in the “wild”. These books teach Lauren what she can and cannot eat. Before the fire, Lauren’s father teaches her and…

Recently, I watched the movie Philadelphia, which was directed by Jonathan Demme in 1993. Mr. Demme has won an oscar, directed over fifty films, including Silence of the Lambs. He also was/is a big proponent of informing citizens about gay rights and the effects of HIV/AIDS. This movie is about a lawyer (named Andrew Beckett), who is gay and has HIV. In the beginning of the storyline he does all that he can to hide these aspects about himself, but a colleague of his notices the one symptom of…

A person truly cannot feel safe while being ‘protected’ by a government that cares for only themselves. There has been a long history of governmental greed that harks back to even the creation of humans since greed has been in our hearts since the very beginning. The exceptionally blunt example is Orwell’s novel “1984”, a clear depiction of a government’s power being misused in favor of their own aspirations. Orwell wrote this novel to express a truth in government and to predict the future that…

Mary Magdalene, Jesus Christ’s wife or the prostitute he renewed? A plethora of questions have been raised about the role Mary Magdalene played in Jesus’ life. When the movie The Da Vinci Code was released, controversy over this topic spread like wildfire. The plot of The Da Vinci Code suggested that there was a hidden blood line, created by none other than Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. As devoted Christians we felt compelled to investigate the topic. The question is: was Mary Magdalene more…

Historically, due to cultural family values, society denied child sexual abuse. What we now identify as abuse was not always thought of as abuse. For instance in 18th-century London people thought a cure for venereal disease was to have sexual relations with a child (Olafson, Corwin, & Summit, 1993).Victims of sexual abuse in American work were thought of as sexual aberrants or participating victims (Gordon, 1988; Schlossman & Wallach, 1978; Weiss, Rogers, Darwin, & Dutton, 1955 as cited in…

Cannibalism: The Reality of its Continuous Existence Cannibalism, or anthropophagy, is the eating of human flesh by human beings and is a practice some cultures still use even to this day. In western culture, rumors of cannibalism are far more prevalent than actual proven cases. For most of us, the thought of a person consuming the flesh of another human is completely taboo. Despite the controversial nature of the topic, isolated occurrences of cannibalism have been confirmed in parts of the…

The Accuracy of Criminal Profiling As society keeps expanding, through growth and technology, more opportunities for crimes pop up in our daily lives, ranging from internet gambling, all the way to insider trading. But as with any criminal movement, criminal justice is not far behind. Half the battle of fighting crime is knowing what to look for, and the other half is knowing how to stop it. Criminal profiling does both, and being in a generation with James Holmes and The Columbine shooting,…

Serial killers and those that kill in mass numbers are one of the most fascinating topics not only for scholars, law enforcement, psychologist, and sociologist, but also to the average, everyday person such as myself. All of us have in common the fascination with the topic because of the disbelief an individual such as this resides among us. We are fascinated not only because of their minds but because they feed into our fears about danger, death and what lurks in the night, around the corner,…

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 The German produced film by Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) hit American shores with a thunderous bang—albeit a divisive and tumultuous one. Though reaction was polarized, from a purely critical perspective, Caligari’s slick and surgical artistic precision exposed a glaring staleness in the air of American cinema, prompting a veritable arms race to match it’s creative force. In his book The Monster Show, author David J. Skal writes, “Caligari built up a…