DO THE RIGHT THING: I don’t care much about Tolkein, but I liked how this post (via Wesley Hill) delineates two different kinds of morality tale: the one about the difficulty of knowing which choice is right, and the one about the difficulty of doing the good even when you know it.

Tangentially: I’ve just watched two recent adaptations of Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. I really don’t approve of how much they mistrust their audience (they’re very tarted-up with chase scenes and self-referential inside jokes and that sort of thing, and the language is mostly simplified) so I don’t think I recommend them, even though I did like a lot of things I think most people wouldn’t, such as Minnie Driver. I always like her. Anyway, the story of An Ideal Husband is strong enough that it’s still very moving. Earnest is harder to get right–so much of its humor depends on the contrast between the ridiculous triviality of its characters’ scruples and objections, and the genuine emotional weight of those scruples’ consequences. You have to make it both dizzy and poignant.

Both of them are morality plays, of course; in Husband the wrongdoing is really serious, while in Earnest it’s the exact opposite of that. There’s a sort of meta-moral to be drawn from the fact that the forgiveness which makes the comedic ending possible is the same in both plays.