Downton Abbey cast A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives. Some truth to that, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. [...]
Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for [...]
On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a concerted attack on Christianity and on the institution that the Church deems the fundamental cell of society, namely the family founded on the marriage of a man and a woman. In the US, Archbishop Chaput and other bishops have reacted strongly to the “contraception mandate”–the plans of the [...]
Americans, as brothers and descendants of Englishmen, were entitled to the rights inherited from the English through the development of Anglo-Saxon common law and through the several political battles. On the eve of the American Revolution, most American thinkers had embraced the idea of all rights (and, therefore, sovereignty) being inherited.[1] Americans, as brothers and [...]
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to clear the bar to justify pushing some other unread book aside. I am very glad, however, that [...]
How convenient. By the same token, of course, to say that a “good” message makes for good art is both foolish and dangerous. Just as the “art” of Socialist Realism, with its paintings of stylized scenes of heroism in the name of “the workers,” is both nasty, lying propaganda and schlock, so the various renderings of “The [...]
Arguments for Conservatism: A Political Philosophy by Roger Scruton. Conservatives always need to be on the look-out for new arguments to defend their positions, despite their conviction that there is “nothing new under the sun.” They may wish to live unreflectively by following the customs of their ancestors, but circumstances require that they also be vigilant [...]
Joseph Pearce Welcome to our new Senior Contributor, Joseph Pearce. Mr. Pearce is writer in residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire and the author of eighteen books. His works include: G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Innocence, Literary Converts, Tolkien: Man and Myth, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, The Quest for Shakespeare, Small [...]
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield (Bloomsbury Press) Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham [...]
One of the privileges of writing this column is that I occasionally get to meet the composers of the music I review. I had a meeting this past year with a musician with whom I have been in correspondence for some time. Morten Lauridsen, the most frequently performed American choral composer, came to Washington, D.C. [...]
Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. Interview of Joseph Pearce by Annamarie Adkins After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached [...]
America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who [...]
On numerous occasions, Mortimer Adler wrote about the criteria that were used to determine which books of all the books written in the West would be placed within The Great Books of the Western World. Contrary to confusion and many misstatements I've read over the years, Adler says it was essentially three criteria and they [...]