The last thing he expected was a ghost. It was irritatingly illogical, but even months later he could think of no better explanation. Pedro dumped his textbooks in his locker and took the back way. It was faster. On a verdant soccer pitch past the university, Girona FC practiced for next Saturday’s grudge match against [...]
“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” C.S. Lewis’ character Professor Digory Kirke calls to light an increasingly detrimental error concerning education in the modern era. The Great Western Tradition and the permanent ideas about education that flow out of it are grounded in a [...]
In the early 1980s, I became one of six men in the Western World who knew how to tie a bow tie, all by myself, and I did not know who the other five were. I ceased wearing them after a colleague said to me, “John, you look like a…Liberal!” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had made [...]
I have always hesitated to comment on the state of our military culture. I have never served and, for a variety of reasons, seriously doubt I ever will be (or ever would have been) called upon to enter combat. But over the years I have come to know a number of military families reasonably well, and to [...]
Review of The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy. In spite of his six widely read novels, his two works of nonfiction (with their original contributions to the study of language and the human psyche), and his two national literary awards, Walker Percy remains a figure on the fringes of the American literary establishment. When he [...]
Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford Part II of “Not in Memoriam, But in Affirmation: Mel Bradford’s Scholarly Legacy at 20” (Part I) Mel Bradford’s interest in the Founding follows naturally from his Agrarianism. He believed that, unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, America’s was a conservative revolution. Both the Declaration of Independence and [...]
Train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. My family and I [...]
Some years ago I wrote a book about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. It was called Secret Fire by the publisher DLT, and The Power of the Ring in the USA (Crossroad didn’t like the UK title). This year, with financial troubles at DLT, it went out of print (in both versions) and I was asked by Crossroad [...]
Part I of “Not in Memoriam, But in Affirmation: Mel Bradford’s Scholarly Legacy at 20” The late Mel Bradford (1934-1993) was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Texan (born in Fort Worth), Bradford earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at the University of Oklahoma before going to [...]
The adages of Erasmus often provide philosophical and religious insight with social and political commentary. It is stunning how relevant many of the adages are to our own time. The Adages of Erasmus, compiled by William Barker (University of Toronto Press, 2001, 384 pages) Reading wisdom literature in any age is wise. Reading wise sayings [...]
If you’re looking to rhyme all the time with the best, You might become mates with the mad anapest; One metrical foot upon which the pest hops Permits you to pull out the rhythmical stops, Then four friends will find him, all merry wee men: Anapaestic tetrameter’s what you have then; While romping together you [...]
What is a case? A case is never a real person. A case is a series of characteristics abstracted from persons; it is a model of those characteristics that a potential client must display in order to qualify for the attention of a bureaucracy. —Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience By the time this ambulance made [...]
Let me begin by citing two passages that graphically underscore the themes that I wish to consider here—the things of leisure and culture, of what is and its surprising origins. The first lines are from Gregory of Nazianzen, the great Eastern theologian: What benefactor has enabled you to look out upon the beauty of the [...]
No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hetacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of [...]