There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so [...]
Today, Allan Bloom’s unlikely 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind is in some ways truer and more moving than ever. I have just taught the book in a class (one that began by reading Tocqueville) filled mostly with very smart yet still overachieving Evangelical students. They eagerly embraced the book as evidence of [...]
Russell Kirk In the franchise bookshops of the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred eighty-one, the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. Yet no civilization rests forever content with literary boredom and literary violence. Once again, a conscience may speak to a [...]
Your people, sir, is…a great beast. So Alexander Hamilton reputedly said in an argument with Thomas Jefferson. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton explained: Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other [...]
James E. Person, Jr. interviews Peter J. Stanlis Peter Stanlis’s groundbreaking work, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958), forever changed the way scholars view Burke’s work. Mr. Stanlis (1919-2011) placed Burke firmly in the tradition of Western natural law reasoning. Mr. Stanlis has also published a number of essays and articles on Frost, including Robert Frost: [...]
Despite a lip service to the importance of creative thinking and moral discrimination and to the necessity of a critical estimate of current patterns of behavior, those who direct the universities care for none of these things. Their chief aim is to turn out graduates who can fit comfortably, if possible eruditely, into the current [...]
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D. C.: Morley Books, 2002. In his generous and beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely unknown territory of twentieth-century music. The title recalls C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and the poem of the [...]
If I think about it, I am saddened that I received the invitation later in life. I wish I had received and accepted the invitation in High School, or college, or certainly graduate school. It was not all my fault, I was not told about the invitation until about twelve years ago. Since that time, [...]
In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss writes that “Prescription cannot be the sole authority for a constitution, and, therefore, recourse to rights anterior to the constitution, i.e., to natural rights, cannot be superfluous unless prescription itself is a sufficient guarantee of goodness.”[1] Such a characterization results in the accusation that those who hold to prescription [...]
If civilisation has nothing to do with morals and religion, if social justice and political liberty are matters of indifference to it, it can have but little contact with human life in its most universal aspects. It is an artificial growth, a hot-house plant which can only flourish in a world in which everyone is [...]
by Carl Olson Dr. Bradley J. Birzer is the author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth. In this interview he talks with Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about his most recent book, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll. Ignatius Insight: Why a book about Charles [...]