I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about August 8 of 1519 Hernán Cortés, a hidalgo, a knight, from Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win “vast and wealthy lands,” set out from a city he called Villa Rica de [...]
The womb and the tomb—one of the most striking mirror images that our lives have to offer. Babies are buried alive in their warm mothers’ girth. Bodies are dead and buried in their cold mother earth. For one, there is the darkness of genesis and growth, for the other, the darkness of death and decay. [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) shaped my life in more ways than I can or ever will understand. At least in this life time. Though he died when I was only five years old, I have often given God thanks for allowing me to live on the same earth as Tolkien. Indeed, [...]
No longer recognizing our duty to form children’s character to fit the norms of virtue, our society more and more sees children as a burden to be indoctrinated into autonomous self-sufficiency as quickly as possible. Now even the Boy Scouts, for so many decades dedicated to forming virtuous young men, sees itself as just another [...]
Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it rejected conservative impulses. One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus [...]
Our friends at Justin Press have recently published two wonderful books especially appealing to those of us who share their admiration of the brilliant English historian Christopher Dawson. The Annotated Quotable Dawson Christopher Dawson, the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, remains the final authority on the relation between religion and culture and is [...]
Not that one spends much of one’s daily routine sympathising with Oscar Wilde, but his quip on Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop comes to mind. “One must have a heart of stone,” he said, “to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” He hadn’t read the book or he’d have known that Nell died off-camera, [...]
Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life (2011), is a significant cultural achievement, not only cinematically but also philosophically. Back in 1969, the philosophically inclined Malick produced a bilingual edition of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, supplying the English translation. With The Tree of Life, the meditative practices visible in his previous films–Badlands (1973), Days of [...]
My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of you to ask yourself: “Do I know what an odyssey is?” In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for [...]
President Barack Obama No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached. The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive. The Barack Obama revealed [...]
Irving Babbitt According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially with the relations between capital and labor. In that case, one is tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied with any degree of thoroughness, [...]
I have always been something of a contrarian. I have never been content to simply accept what “everyone knows” as given. This—perhaps paradoxically—is precisely what leads me, in many ways, to my conservative disposition; but I will return to this point presently. It was also this contrarian impulse which led me to St. John’s College. [...]
Gaston County and the county seat of Gastonia, located in the southwestern part of North Carolina, bear his name, a fitting tribute to the easterner who came to support the rights of his western brethren. In his day, his legal acumen was hailed by none other than the great Luther Martin of Maryland, perhaps the [...]
What has been said of the Roman empire, is at least as true of the British constitution—“Octingentorum annorum fortuna, disciplinaque, compages haec coaluit; quae convelli sine convellentium exitio non potest. ”1 This British constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the assembly of pettifoggers run mad [...]