It always struck me as a curious expression and one my mother always used when she caught me in a moment of idle day-dreaming, a gift I own to this day: woolgathering. More so since the veterinarian in my small home town did raise sheep and did shear sheep and sent us out with bags [...]
“Old books” speak to the times, often in more profound ways than “new books.” Christopher Dawson's "Beyond Politics" is just such a book. It diagnosed in 1939 the cultural situation in which the book appeared, and its diagnosis is apropos to the cultural situation today. Here’s the front story followed by the more important back [...]
Walter Lippmann believed that Natural Laws are the principles of right reason and behavior in the good society governed by Western traditions of civility. It is possible to organize a state and conduct a government on quite different principles, but the outcome will not be freedom and the good life. Thus the environment with which [...]
Two books about St. Francis: one by the protean English critic and one by an equally protean Greek. How, though, to treat their differences, especially since the books are unalike in length and fervency? St. Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton and Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis So in this perilous grace of God [...]
George Weigel asks his readers to “reimagine” Vatican II and examines whether it is true that the Council prescribed a fatal concession to the modern world, which according to the disaffected should be “repudiated or quietly buried.” If such is thought about at all, the legacy of Vatican I seems firmly place. Pope Pius IX [...]
As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I’m too Christian for Harold Bloom’s blessing. So be it. [i] The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been blamed and broken and half-blinded by the [...]
Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In the opening [...]
Will a day come on which the sins of man will be forgiven and the midden of the earth returned to beauty? I. Whether History Is One Tapestry.... The first paragraph in the conclusion to Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day reads as follows: This is a history. But there is only one history. It began [...]
At his farm, my grandfather had rigged what he called his “snow ropes”: hand-hold-by-hand-hold, the snow ropes prevent getting lost and wandering off in who knows what direction only to freeze and be found come spring. I’m interested in “snow ropes” and, well, mysticism and religious language. The mystic says, that “God is a blinding [...]
Can one still be an aspirant in old age? That unknown fourteenth-century author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" wrote his text for a 24-year-old aspirant. There’s a moment in the book in which the author writes about how we cannot think our way to God, since God can only be loved. So we have to [...]
Who, then, was Gabriel Marcel, and why spend time on a philosopher who, unlike his contemporaries, never refused to recognize the “ontological” mystery? It could have been that my conversion was like an answer from Heaven to a prayer that [my mother] made without knowing that some days later she would leave this earth. Shaken [...]
The times lacerate us, crucify us. Can we tease out the meanings, or are the meanings beyond us? Someone has to watch while the world is burning and toll the bell. Is there still the possibility for love in the ruins? (from a memoir, The Man Who Balanced A Tea Cup On His Head and other [...]
The more genuine sources of order come not from opinion-makers but from custom, convention, and continuity. The appeal is to the three parts that make an associated sensibility: heart, imagination, and intellect, and all three are calculating and decision-making, and all three tutored by the eternal standards of what is right and what is wrong. [...]
I remember the excitement the day the crates arrived and were carefully opened, and what emerged was overwhelming. What was beginning to happen was a unique partnership combining all the art forms: poetry, painting, music, and theater into one evening’s performance. She was British-chilly until I brought out the gin: one ice cube and a [...]