"The East is another name for the West"—Sufi proverb In Memory of Stephen J. Masty When, in happier days, she was inscrutable "Arabia," and felix the plucky cognomen-ex-virtute honoring a mythological lineage of Sheban queens, Roman misadventure, and flourishing trade routes scented in cinnamon and frankincense, the greatest of English explorers submitted to her virgin [...]
Be careful what you read—it may change you, for better or worse. In the case of Joseph Pearce, his early reading made him a violent white supremacist. It also landed him in jail. While there, he continued to read; only this time, he read the works of G.K. Chesterton. It was not so much that [...]
For the first time in nearly a decade I again have the great pleasure of teaching a freshman language tutorial. I am myself a believer in the "spirit" of a tutorial, because I am convinced that what happens in class for well or ill is nothing beyond the accumulated effect of the goodness or deficiency [...]
We were preparing the annual financial report to the parish the other day, and the tricky part of the debate was how to present complex details in a simple way that was not misleading or open to misinterpretation. I commented that we must aim for complete transparency, at which point a member of the committee [...]
The Federal Government is the creature of the States. It is not a party to the Constitution, but the result of it—the creation of that agreement which was made by the States as parties. It is a mere agent, entrusted with limited powers for certain specific objects; which powers and objects are enumerated in the [...]
Last week, my wife, a painter-friend of ours, who wishes to be anonymous, and I did the Friday night walk down Canyon Road, the site of numerous galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small town that is the third-largest art market in the United States. Halfway down Canyon Road, we stopped in at a [...]
Modern England is so secular in her orientation and so narcissistic in her hedonism that she treats her own heritage with scornful and supercilious neglect. This was made painfully clear to me this January when I returned to my native land to film a documentary on the great Catholic poet, Francis Thompson. Described by Chesterton [...]
When Edmund Burke surveyed the names of those leading the French Revolution in its first half year of existence in 1789, he despaired. Several were certainly good men, he noted, and many were quite accomplished. Yet, not a single man possessing any necessary experience in the world appeared on the list. “The best,” he lamented, [...]
American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, [...]
There’s a chilling image from my youth that I’ve never been able to scrub out of my mind. It might not seem at first glance to amount to much. It was a blue spiral spray-painted on our street, a sort of insect with enormous eyes, with a caption suggesting LSD. In those days, the newspapers [...]
One of the toughest things about living in America is the relative absence of the presence of the past. In England one is immersed in the past to such a degree that it is all too easy to forget that it’s there or to take it for granted. I once lived in a tiny cottage [...]
I have now sat through my mandatory Title IX training, which is to say I spent ninety minutes in an Orwellian swamp of doublespeak, barely hidden bigotry, and will to power, decreed by the Obama Administration and enthusiastically carried out by a combination of mid-level administrators and high-paid legal “experts.” For those of you blissfully unaware [...]
Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. […]
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation. —St. Thomas Aquinas The trouble with mere pragmatism is that it doesn’t work. —G.K. Chesterton What is education? I emphasize “is” because I am not here asking what education is thought to be, or what [...]