Solzhenitsyn understood the crisis of our time—namely, the failure of those who make, enjoy, and judge the constitutionality of laws to appreciate the dire consequences of denying the place of natural-law considerations in the ordering of public life. Some 20,000 umbrella-carrying attendees witnessed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address on a rainy afternoon at Harvard University in [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
Biographies by Fr. Bernard Bro and and Kathryn Harrison give us two vivid depictions of St. Thérèse. Yet, attitudinally speaking, their accounts of this Christ-imitating, self-immolating woman of Lisieux have little in common. Thérèse of Lisieux made the first record of her life, and that record, written in obedience to her Carmelite superior, is the [...]
Joseph Pearce’s “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church” presents a compelling case in suggesting that its subject evolved “into a very Catholic sort of Protestant.” Though C.S. Lewis never became a Roman Catholic, his later works betray a growing affinity for Catholic teaching. C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce (220 pages, [...]
For Harold Bloom, our intellectual strength, the strength of Western civilization, consists in the canon: “Without the Canon we cease to think.” Reading canonical literature serves the individual exclusively: “It enables one to know and endure oneself as a human being.” In the introduction to his controversial masterpiece The Western Canon: The Books and School [...]
“No society is worth ‘saving’ as such,” wrote Allen Tate (1899–1979). “What we must save is the truth of God and man, and the right society follows.”1 Such words are anathema to the secularists whose “progressive” theories have intoxicated the modern mind. Words of this kind are neither popular nor politically expedient in an age [...]
If there is one essential theme in Charles Williams’ writing, it is summed up in his favorite quotation from Julian of Norwich: “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensualities God is.” His wife recalled that their life together, from beginning to end, aspired to [...]
Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) As [...]
With his students, the ideal teacher of literature seeks the center of knowledge, which he understands in metaphysical or theological terms. His vehicle is poetry, by which he means the imaginative creation of action and character in either prose or verse. When they seek the center in communion with the greatest of poets, teacher and student [...]
Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O'Connor's protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, [...]
In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (554 pages, [...]
Russell Hittinger’s “The First Grace” deals mightily with the crisis of our time—namely, the failure of those who make, enjoy, and judge the constitutionality of laws to appreciate the dire consequences of denying the place of natural-law considerations in the ordering of public life. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, [...]
Heaven is an unreality for contemporary physicalists of all schools of thought who preach that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world can be explained solely in materialist terms. Yet for those who are open to the sacramental dimension of our diurnal existence, heaven is here, there, and everywhere. Paradise Mislaid: [...]
For several months after his 1939 immigration to the United States, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) remained enchanted with all the old dogmas—psychology, Marxism, and liberal humanism—that had shaped so much of his early work. As a poet, he continued to assert his faith in man’s ability to save civilization from ruin. Composed like all mankind “Of [...]