About James Baresel

James Baresel holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Cincinnati and a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville and has taught English, Latin, religion, and the history of art at the high-school level.

Calling All the Young Fogies

By |2023-09-21T15:22:05-05:00September 21st, 2023|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

In stressing the importance of beauty and formality, the young fogey movement provides an antidote to modernity’s utilitarianism and narcissistic childishness. Looking into the life of a contemporary English writer, I happened upon a reference to the “young fogies” of 1980s England, an assortment of men then in their first decade or two of adult life [...]

Should Beauty Have a Purpose?

By |2023-09-15T19:49:21-05:00September 14th, 2023|Categories: Art, Books, Culture, Featured, Literature, Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

The love of beauty as such is one of the things that can attract men to the God who is infinitely beautiful. But is it the case that we ought to pursue beauty only to the extent that it is joined to some function? A previous essay of mine published in this journal made passing reference [...]

The Crisis of the Humanities & Prospects for Revival

By |2023-09-08T17:56:44-05:00September 8th, 2023|Categories: Featured, Humanities, Liberal Learning, Russell Kirk|

The crisis in the humanities that we see today does not concern numbers so much as belief. A society dedicated to empiricism and utilitarianism is a society that does not recognize the superiority of philosophic knowledge, or the importance of the aesthetic. It is now a year-and-a-half since I had the opportunity to visit the [...]

The Dilemma of the Conservative Artist

By |2023-08-17T17:54:16-05:00August 17th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Conservatism, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]

Locating the Tory Tradition in American History

By |2019-10-30T13:35:35-05:00January 4th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Christianity, Declaration of Independence, Featured, History, Revolution|

We ought to locate the basis of American conservatism in our colonial past, at a time when the English Tory variant of the old order of Europe had a real presence in our civilization, and we ought to remember that the old Tory order survived in the American historical tradition despite the Revolution of '76, [...]

Should Christians Romanticize the Middle Ages?

By |2020-07-26T13:15:21-05:00September 7th, 2016|Categories: Architecture, Catholicism, Distributism, Economics, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc|

Many Catholics treat the High Middle Ages as a veritable ideal of civilization. But the medieval period produced problematic ideas about aesthetics, eccentric theories of economics, and dangerous assumptions about politics. Over a decade ago a then-acquaintance of mine inquired as to my economic views, my response being that I was “a distributist by default.” [...]

Does the Church Oppose the Free Market?

By |2016-08-29T16:24:30-05:00August 27th, 2016|Categories: Catholicism, Charity, Economics|

It’s quite easy to forgive those who experience an attack of nausea upon hearing the phrase “Catholic Social Thinking.” In light of the misuse from which that phrase has suffered over the past half-century alternative responses are all too likely to indicate either that a person has not been paying attention or is lacking in [...]

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