John Stuart Mill may well serve as an invaluable ally in searching out the roots of our ancient Anglo-American order that guarantee liberty as it coexists with order, neither at the other’s expense. He has a great deal of compassion and insight we could benefit from immensely, and it would be to our own disadvantage [...]
Does “Paradise Lost” succeed as a poem qua poem, but not as a didactic theological poem? If we lived four hundred year earlier, might we suggest Milton pit Satan primarily against St. Gabriel or St. Michael? The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not [...]
We have been conservatives for too long. We’ve been content merely to mitigate the effects of the demonic forces unleashed by revolutionary movements like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Now, we must become reactionaries. Only by a mass reversion of the West to the apostolic faith can we end this permanent revolution and throw off [...]
We conservatives need to begin approaching ideas rather than labels. Where we rightfully oppose Marxism for adopting a soullessly ideological worldview, we should be careful to note that Liberalism, though as dangerous as any other ideology when adopted with fanaticism, is also too close to home for us to dismiss in the same way. It [...]
Alas, we can’t un-invent digital technology. Pandora’s box can’t be closed once it’s opened. The 20th century gave rise to no end of technologies that mankind has come to acknowledge as absolutely evil and yet that we can’t eradicate completely. For those brave and willing few, however, I urge you to join me in taking [...]
The West has been undone by consumerism, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization—all defended by modern conservatives as “the price we must pay” to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. As Russell Kirk argued, the principal function of government is not to ensure the material security and comfort of its citizenry. [...]
Frank Meyer was a man looking desperately for faults in the philosophy to which he was most attracted: traditionalism. Finding none, he simply made up another philosophy: fusionism. But instead of coopting the energy and scientific rigor of libertarianism for the traditionalist cause, he simply empowered the former at the latter’s expense… American conservatism originates [...]
Those who come to the Catholic Church are generally escaping the merely modern for the ancient, the enduring, and the everlasting. They do not want worship that reflects the current mood: They want worship instituted for all men and for all times. Though, as with any high-church Protestant, conversion to Roman Catholicism is always in [...]
John Adams Gathering my thoughts to once again tackle the question of monarchism, I glanced over the comments on my 2014 essay, “Why I’m a Monarchist.” One commenter, known only as Harris and identified only as an aging Maltese, noted that “Thomas Hobbes makes the argument more pungently, and more brutally. What is [...]
Cultural relativism is that preferred meta-ethical philosophy of left-wing apologists for barbarities committed by Islamists and other violent fanatics, both at home and abroad. When some old-school liberal like Bill Maher condemns some Middle Eastern theocracy for preventing women from driving, executing apostates, or refusing to prosecute honor killings—for being, in a word, illiberal—he’s barraged [...]
I have been encouraged by Mr. Joseph Pearce’s two excellent essays, “How Many Loves? Arguing with C.S. Lewis” and “The Vulgar Mob: Arguing with G.K. Chesterton,” to offer up a little challenge to one thinker who has indelibly influenced my own conservatism. I have tremendous admiration for Roger Scruton’s courage in abandoning his academic career [...]
The official position of the Obama Administration seems to be that our country is at war with extremism, including but not limited to those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam. It is also the position of the executive branch that proclaiming war against radical Islam specifically is unjustified, and for two reasons: first, [...]
Justin Welby, the humble and good-humored Archbishop of Canterbury, marked himself from the beginning of his reign by the contrast he struck with his predecessor Rowan Williams, now Baron of Oystermouth. Lord Williams was one of the seminal reasons for my conversion to Anglicanism. He was born in Ystradgynlais in Swansea, Wales, to a Welsh-speaking [...]
Once after Mass, on a rare lazy Sunday afternoon, I dropped by the train station’s news agent and browsed the book rack for a light read—something one would pick up in an airport to keep occupied, but not busy. I picked out Deborah Crombie’s Leave the Grave Green. The blurb on the back cover reads: [...]