At the beginning of his epic poem, “The Ballad of the White Horse,” one of the two greatest Christian apologists of the previous century speculatively proclaimed: For the end of the world was long ago And all we dwell today As children of some second birth Like a strange people left on earth After a [...]
A Hot Humid Day in South Bend On July 24, 2008, Rush finished its “Snakes and Arrows” tour with a concert in Indianapolis. I was researching that day at Notre Dame, and I could easily have made the 1.5-hour trip south to see them. For lots of reason (none of which I remember very well [...]
Christopher Dawson Part III: Contending Against Liberalism (click on links to go to Part I or Part II) As Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the death and terror they caused, he often produced some of his most impassioned work. The forerunner to such [...]
Christopher Dawson Part II: The Fulfillment of Liberalism (find Part I) In the end, Dawson believed, liberalism destroyed far more than it created. By the end of the eighteenth century, he feared, little of traditional western culture—beyond the Protestant Americans and the Lutheran and Catholic peasants of Europe—remained religious. The dominant political philosophy of that [...]
Christopher Dawson Part I: Christopher Dawson on Liberalism In the earliest drafts of the biography I wrote of Christopher Dawson, Sanctifying the World (2007), dedicated to our very own William Winston Elliott III, I included three largish-sections regarding Dawson’s critique of liberalism: The Rise of Liberalism; The Fulfillment of Liberalism; and Contending Against [...]
There are days and, then, there are days. In 1948, T.S. Eliot assumed that western civilization moved inexorably toward a new dark age. “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline,” he lamented. “The standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and the evidences of [...]
Last week, I had the privilege of lecturing on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Passed unanimously by Congress in New York on July 13, 1787, this law never ceases to inspire me. As our own venerable John Willson has argued many times, it is, quite possibly, the most impressive republican law ever passed. Protecting religious [...]
Painting by Jef Murray Almost half of a decade ago, I applied for an interesting position–to be the first head of a new liberal arts program at a Catholic college in New England. The college is old and venerable, but it’s gone through the typical changes toward the worse experienced by most small [...]
Benjamin Pap Singleton Last night, as I was thinking about falling asleep, I quickly checked my Twitter account. As I almost always do, I found something very interesting from a man I’ve come to respect immensely, though we’ve never actually met—Jamara Newell, who goes by the name of “Sir Geechie,” a South Carolinian [...]
Certainly, as John Willson and others have argued throughout their professional careers, one of the greatest problems of western civilization has been its attempt to balance universal truths (not necessarily limited to the transcendent and divine truths, but timeless and universal nonetheless) with particular, cultural expressions of those truths. Throughout the history of our civilization, [...]
One of the most surprising things to me since the inauguration of this site is our constant need to re-examine the word “conservatism.” Over the past 44 months, a question about definition or label or something related to this has come up at least 44 times, if not more. […]
Russell Kirk deserves special attention on the topic of ideologies. In his twenty-nine books on politics, history, constitutional law, literature, social criticism, economics, and fiction, the legacy of the French Revolution and the loosening of the ideologues upon the world haunted him at a profound level. Tellingly, Kirk’s most important influence was Edmund Burke, the [...]
To what end were 205 million human persons—created in the Image of God—murdered in the twentieth century, one must ask? And, why did millions more suffer for being simply human persons, unique, unfathomable, unrepeatable? The answer, unfortunately, is not an easy one, and very few scholars—historians, philosophers, or theologians—have attempted to answer this question. In [...]