Dr. Thomas Pink uses Wilfred Owen’s poem ’The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ with its adaptation of the account of Abraham and Isaac to examine how authority has been seen in the twentieth century – looking at various conceptions of authority both ecclesial and secular, especially in the period following WWI, and at the idea of the patriarch (an idea often appealed to in certain political cultures to explain civil authority – but equally long felt, by a certain tradition in Catholic theology as well as by many secular thinkers, to be a very problematic model of civil authority.