About Anthony Esolen

Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and professor of English Renaissance and classical literature. Dr. Esolen is on the Magdalen College faculty and is Writer-in-Residence. His books include Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization; Ironies of Faith; and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He has also translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate (Johns Hopkins Press); and Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

The Lovely Dragon of Choice: The Freedom Not to Be Free

By |2021-08-11T19:01:42-05:00August 11th, 2021|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Culture, Essential, Featured, Timeless Essays|

To see and to live is better than to choose; to ride the adventure of faith and hope and love is better than to plot your course to the Fortunate Isles, those illusions. But all things come to them that wait. Into sight silently draws a ship, draped in black silk, with a maiden of [...]

We No Longer Make Boys Into Men

By |2021-01-24T15:56:26-06:00January 24th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Family, Modernity, Sexuality|

In our time of fatherlessness, underachieving boys, social fraying, and the collapse of marriage, helping boys to become men needs to be done. We owe it to them in justice, or else we will not have healthy families, parishes, neighborhoods, and towns. Many years ago, in an article for Touchstone called, “A Requiem for Friendship,” [...]

The Suicide of a Civilization

By |2020-12-09T15:59:46-06:00December 9th, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Civilization, Culture, Death|

Suppose an anthropologist were asked, apart from the sound and fury of current politics, what were the signs of a dying culture, or a culture committing suicide? What might he respond, as following from human nature and from the terms of the question itself? What might he notice in our own? Such a culture would [...]

Is the Human Brain Just Like a Computer?

By |2019-05-09T15:49:02-05:00July 5th, 2018|Categories: Christianity, Nature, Science, Technology|

Some dream of a time when we will achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the brain into a computer. But is this truly possible?… I have just read a fascinating and, to my mind, cheerful article, by the research psychologist Robert Epstein, on why your brain is not a computer—for the simple reason that your brain does not store memories [...]

“Message From Another World”: A Forgotten, Forbidden Textbook

By |2021-02-19T13:55:26-06:00January 25th, 2017|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Literature|

Such textbooks as the one I found would be drummed out of today’s schools, where children are taught to be embarrassed by piety, honor, purity, and faith. I am musing upon a fine book written by a teacher and prolific author, Leroy Armstrong. He is introducing the reader to the life and the work of [...]

Sleepers, Wake!

By |2016-12-05T00:43:49-06:00December 3rd, 2016|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Catholicism, Christianity|

The awakened man does not gaze into the pool of his spirituality, like a more ethereal Narcissus. He sees Christ in his neighbor, and his is a life of longing, hope, gratitude, solemn emotion, and openness to the mysteries of being… Many of us no doubt have heard the common excuse for breaking the third [...]

The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims

By |2018-10-02T13:33:09-05:00November 22nd, 2016|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Featured, Marriage, Sexuality|Tags: |

The sexual revolution has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness. Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim… What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of [...]

What Happened to Teaching Western Civilization?

By |2020-01-16T15:04:57-06:00September 26th, 2016|Categories: Classical Education, Featured, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Literature, Western Civilization|

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 [...]

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