About Nayeli Riano

Nayeli L. Riano is a writer whose work reflects on literature, politics, history, art, and faith. She is a Ph.D. student in political theory at Georgetown University and holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews (M.Litt, Intellectual History) and the University of Pennsylvania (BA, English and French Studies). Follow her on twitter@NayeliLRiano.

Poetry? What Is It Good For?

By |2020-03-06T02:04:55-06:00December 20th, 2018|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Literature, Poetry|

Poetry is a paradox. It is the most complex and inimitable expression of thought and consciousness, but it is also the most natural and ancient. Although a form of oral and written tradition that has persisted throughout the years, poetry is dismissed as unnecessary and impractical in literary education… A decline in English majors at universities demonstrates [...]

Leo Strauss vs. Edmund Burke

By |2019-07-30T15:56:42-05:00December 3rd, 2018|Categories: Books, Edmund Burke, History, Leo Strauss, Nature, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Reason, Truth|

What ought to take primacy when carrying out research and interpreting seminal books: the text itself, or the context? A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in 1957 in the Journal of Politics and introduced a problem with the field: Modern academic obsessions over positivism [...]

T.S. Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon”: Of Memory & Salvation

By |2024-01-04T14:12:46-06:00August 8th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Modernity, St. Augustine, T.S. Eliot|

T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive. “These things I do within, in that vast chamber of [...]

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