An elderly woman picks up a telephone and a strange voice says, Remember you must die. “Who is that speaking, who is it?” the elderly Dame Lettie demands, but the caller, “as on eight previous occasions,” has already hung up. So who is it that is calling and saying these foreboding words to the cast of [...]
Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 In philosophy, religion, politics, and other arenas of communal life, we are confronted with choices between radical contraries. We can choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche (according to Alasdair MacIntyre); we can choose between God and Mammon (as Jesus instructs in the Sermon on the Mount), or, as [...]
In 1962, historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn shocked the academic world with his book The Structures of Scientific Revolution. He asserted that scientific communities are closed-minded and promote convergent thinking as a function of dogma in scientific work. The jolt is that science is popularly thought of as promoting divergent thinking and open-minded inquiry. Kuhn concedes [...]
“What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner. But, if you cannot read them, at any rate handle and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. [...]
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”[1] “We create men without chests and bid them breathe, we castrate geldings and bid them be fruitful.”[2] “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”[3] At Augustine School we are committed to the authority of Scripture in [...]
March 1, 2012, marked the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. In 1912 400 eminent writers, journalists, editors, social reformers, university presidents, and public men, including William Howard Taft, who had altered his schedule to attend, crowded Sherry’s restaurant in New York City to celebrate Howells’s 75th birthday. From England, Thomas Hardy and Henry [...]
While our political and cultural elites debate about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, it may be worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask what truly is at stake here. My sense is that the debate about illegal immigration–as well as over topics like same-sex marriage or national [...]
“Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true good? Have they found the remedy for our ills? Is man’s pride cured by placing him on an equality with God?”— Pascal, Pensēes, #430. “Salvation, such as it shall [...]
Willa Cather On Sunday, August 11, 2013, my family and I began our now-yearly odyssey into the West. As I write this, our vacation is ending, and I’m typing this from the second floor of a rented house in the Rockies, looking across my laptop out the window at Mt. Ouray. In two [...]
Shakespeare “It was William of Occam,” writes Richard Weaver in his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences, “who propounded the fateful idea of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.” Weaver compares this development in the intellectual history of Western man to Macbeth’s ominous meeting with the Weird Sisters: “Have we forgotten our [...]
Here is a rather silly story, brought to my attention by The Imaginative Conservative’s own Stephen Masty. It should tell us something about how very silly lawyers’ views of morals and the law have become in recent years. According to Religion News Service, among others, one Dola Indidis, a lawyer in Kenya, has petitioned the International [...]
In the early twenty-first century the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition of uncertainty. No one is willing to say what it should consist of or what it should accomplish. The auspices, however, may be better than they seem in that we have come through a very difficult phase and [...]
Robert Hutchins Studying and leading conversations on the Great Books for more than twenty years still produces that sense of awe and wonder, especially when I discover a new tool to aide in the exploration of wisdom. Unfortunately, this excitement is often curtailed when I engage many of those within the academy. Once, [...]
On August 24, 1814, in one of history’s most farsighted and selfless moments, British troops burned down Washington, DC. Americans never even thanked them, only rebuilt and wasted the opportunity. Now the bicentennial is only a year away, so let’s make amends. Every heartland town needs a down-home barbecue with children waving American flags and [...]