From time to time, there is the need for sentinels of classical learning, individuals who, if one is fortunate to be around them, beckon the meandering intellect back to the pursuit of the truth, the discovery of the good, and the conservation of the beautiful. In the end, the student is invited to the quest [...]
Democracies were acutely problematic when they did not collectively comprehend the necessity of legitimate authority permeating the polis. Lacking this understanding, power was elevated in authority’s absence… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join José Maria J. Yulo as he uses Jacques Maritain and Thucydides to explore [...]
In the last few years, accounts of the growing politicization of academic discourse have made their way from colleges and universities onto conversations on a public, and perhaps national, scale. What is the essence behind such rancor?… There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. -G. K. [...]
Contrary to conventional wisdom, this age’s crisis is not one of faith. If anything, there is plenty of faith around, in both good and bad things. What we lack is that which since the Middle Ages has been seen as a complement to faith: reason… Thoughtful Theism: Redeeming Reason in an Irrational Age by [...]
Our final cause is not tied to this world we live in. Though we inhabit the world for a rather temporary span of time, we do have enough time, no matter what polity or era we live in, to decide for ourselves whether or not we will accept the purpose for which we are [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join José Maria Yulo as he reflects on the joys of examining an idea for its own worth, apart from any attendant political and emotional entreaties on its behalf. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher And above all, we should remember that there is simply [...]
In the days when Huxley and Herbert Spencer and the Victorian agnostics were trumpeting as a final truth the famous hypothesis of Darwin, it seemed to thousands of simple people almost impossible that religion should survive. It is all the more ironic that it has not only survived them all, but it is a [...]
Thus says the Lord: Do not learn the ways of the nations, and have no fear of the signs of the heavens, even though the nations fear them. For the carvings of the nations are nonentities, wood cut from the forest, fashioned by artisans with the adze, adorned with silver and gold. With nails and [...]
Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit…–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics In the study of physics, force is influence which tends to [...]
And yet I seem to know this simple truth: If the bestowing of the famous armor Had rested with Achilles while he lived, To give them as a war-prize to the bravest, No rival then would have filched them from my hands; -Sophocles, Ajax The Greek playwright Sophocles once wrote the tale of a [...]
“And above all, we should remember that there is simply no point in winning the argument if we know we are wrong.” -Mortimer Adler It was 1992, and as the nation prepared to reelect the current administration or elect an incoming one, no dearth of opinions could be found in the national punditry. It [...]
“To say that private men have nothing to do with government is to say that private men have nothing to do with their own happiness or misery; that people ought not to concern themselves whether they be naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, protected or destroyed.”—Marcus Cato The Elder “Didst thou [...]
Scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it. –Histories, Polybius Infirmity doth still neglect all office Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves When [...]