There are few twentieth-century intellectual figures to whom one might apply the adjective “essential.” One of the earliest is Paul Elmer More, perhaps the last century’s greatest Christian apologist. The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition. —Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” in Norman Forester, Humanism [...]
What in the twenty-fifth hour might happen to those of us who prefer to live outside the data flow, still analog, still un-captured? Take some time to read "The Twenty-Fifth Hour," a deep and dark book narrating history prior to World War II. It is for the reader to wonder if the novel resonates today. [...]
It’s time for Orestes Brownson to re-enter our contemporary political discourse, and on the campaign trail to remind us, first, that all just authority is from God, who instituted natural law, and also, that moral authority is not relative. I. The Brownson Revival In 1993 Peter J. Stanlis revisited Orestes Brownson’s political thought by reviewing [...]
I could see down below the mountain path a lone figure coming up, dressed in a brown cloak and with a walking stick. It was a wandering monk, who introduced himself simply as Brother Anthony and plopped himself down. He had no weariness in his heart and soul, or so it seemed to me. This little [...]
Saul Bellow's protagonist Artur Sammler is both witness and survivor to the central event in his own time: the attempt on the part of Hitler and his henchmen to eradicate European Jewry. But even though the novel takes place in a different time and place, behind those contemporary times are the ghosts from that World [...]
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 [...]