The beauty of fairy tales is their ability to attractively depict character and virtue. Goodness glimmers while wickedness and deception are unmasked. The notion that fairy tales and fantasy stories stimulate and instruct the moral imagination of the young is, of course, not new. The Victorians certainly held to that notion when they brought the [...]
Russell Kirk was aware that others had also claimed the mantle of humanism, but in the name of secularism. The revival of Christian humanism in our time is spurred by the need to respond to the rise of this popular secular humanism and its half-truths. During a dinner conversation with Russell and Annette Kirk in [...]
The week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. He gave in many respects an eloquent and well-crafted speech. It set down with considerable skill the meaning of the attacks and reasons to launch the war on terrorism. Nonetheless, the President made few references [...]
Aldous Huxley cautions modern folk, who think or assume that they can continuously redefine or reconstruct primary forms of human relationship without risk, that their actions may lead to unintended, unanticipated, and unwanted consequences… Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from Rallying the Really Human Things by Vigen Guroian (325 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005) The theme of Brave [...]
Flannery O’Connor made it her task to show her readers that the world is surrounded by mystery and that the physical creation is itself an icon and a window into that mystery. “What the word says, the image shows silently; what we have heard, we have seen.” That is how the Seventh Great Ecumenical Council [...]
Chesterton proposed a new Christian humanism, while simultaneously warning of the dangers of a popular secular humanism that behaves as a religion. We need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.[1] That was the judgment of G. K. [...]