The recent English controversy over the banning of fox hunting has ramifications that go to the heart of the future of the United States. If there are two Englands, rural and urban, there are two Americas also, the red heartland and the blue coastal fringes. The traditional heart of America...
Speaking personally, I’d rather discuss many things during this joyful season of Advent than “capitalism.” And yet Matthew Summers’ recent essay “In Defense of Capitalism” for The Imaginative Conservative has prompted me to comment on the...
This Christmas I’m taking a leap of the imagination into the home of a family of imaginary conservatives. It is Christmas morning and I arrive, as if by magic, down the chimney, just as the family is gathering...
The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Yet many of the giants were not heroes, and many of the heroes were not giants.
Hitler was a giant, as were Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Each...
Advent has only just begun but many of us are already thinking of Christmas. In one sense, this is fair enough. Advent is a time of preparation for our celebration of the...
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory. - J.R.R. Tolkien
Together through ages of the world we have fought...
We live in a pathetically dumbed-down culture. Levels of literacy and numeracy plummet and levels of ignorance rise. Knowledge of the past disappears, its lessons unlearned, as the present shows its contempt for the wisdom of the...
Back in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s an evil regime, inspired by the relativist ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, sought to breed a master race, practicing eugenics to eliminate those it considered subhuman (untermenschen), including...
The following is a reply to a letter received from a prisoner, recently received into the Catholic Church, who had previously been involved in white supremacist organizations.
It was good to receive your letter, not least because it’s...
It is time to whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, it’s time to face the real facts about Oscar Wilde and his real views on homosexuality...
It was with a queer...
What is friendship? Why is it important and why is it worth cultivating? These axiomatic questions form a significant part of the thought and writing of C. S. Lewis. In a letter to his lifelong friend,...
The self is more distant than any star, says G.K. Chesterton, and we can only see the distant star which is the ego by learning to gaze beyond the self to the stars in the sky and the stars that sparkle in the eyes of our neighbours...
The farcical aftermath of Elizabeth Warren’s claims to have Native American blood has set me thinking about the utter madness of the world in which we live. In the first instance, what are we to think of...
Augustine is accessible and applicable because he is one of us. He suffers from the same temptations and succumbs to those temptations. He falls and does not always get up again, preferring to wallow in the gutter with his lusts and his illicit appetites. And yet, like...
