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 [...]
What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst [...]
Democracy is dead. I say so not because I have ceased to believe in it—I retain a half guilty affection for that worst of all forms of government (worst except for most of the rest)—rather, I say so because everyone else has ceased to believe in it. Yesterday, I asked my students what comes first [...]
Let’s get straight to the point. We no longer live in a culturally Christian state. We do not live in a robust pagan state, such as Rome was during the Pax Romana. We live in a sickly sub-pagan state, or metastate, a monstrous thing, all-meddlesome, all-ambitious. The natural virtues are scorned. Temperance is for prigs, [...]
How should we judge the health of a culture? We might do it by pointing to its greatest virtues. The Greek city states between 500 and 300 B.C., though they were not especially densely populated, gave the West the architectural “language” it still employs for everything from grand hotels to private homes. The colonial house, [...]
We ought to rename our planet according to the bureaucratic shackles we place upon our children. We shall call it Tormentaria. It seems quite apt. The Tormentarians are a humane race. They don’t favor harsh (though swift) punishment; they grow queasy if anyone mentions a whipping post or even a smack on the posterior. They [...]
“For all I am of poet,” says the stranger to the two men climbing the mountain of Purgatory, the Aeneid was my mama and my nurse; without it, all my work weighs not a dram. And I’d content to spend an extra year— could I have lived on earth when Virgil lived— suffering for my [...]
You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget. The other night I testified [...]
Every week it seems I receive three or four letters from people who are establishing new schools or reforming old ones. These letters are most encouraging, and all of the writers, without exception, are dedicated to restoring what is called a “classical” education. Sometimes that implies the study of the true classics, the literature of ancient [...]
A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They’re all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children’s bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of [...]
I’ve donned my boots and leggings, and done what I had no desire to do. I am examining, with tedious scrutiny, the so-called Common Core Curriculum for literature and English, a new’n’improved set of standards for reading and writing in our schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I have read the essays, written by students, which [...]
Chesterton once wrote that the madman is not the fellow who has lost his reason, but the fellow who has lost everything but his reason. Such a person, seized by a single monomaniacal idea, loses his balance, as if under the weight of a mental hypertrophy. Because a man may add five and six, and a cash [...]
Featured Book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen Christianity. Judaism. Dead white males. Old-fashioned morality. The traditional family. Tradition itself. These are the bêtes noires of the elites.They are the pillars of political incorrectness. Together, they constitute that thing called Western civilization. Political correctness, at its heart, is the effort to dissolve the [...]
Thomas Aquinas, practical fellow that he was, understood that not all bad things can feasibly be proscribed by human law. It isn’t because people disagree about what is bad, but rather that a well-governed polity should require few laws, easily promulgated and understood, broadly promoting the common good, wherein the lawgiver can attend to things [...]