“Go on to the Useless Presents.”
I think of that line often at Christmastime. It comes from Dylan Thomas’s “A Child Christmas in Wales.” A young boy implores the narrator to describe the kinds...
Good fiction deals with powerful themes and does so by embedding them in the plot line and character arc—so the word becomes flesh. This is the power of great drama and fiction: that we get caught up in the story and the emotion opens our heart, and...
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...
For the ancient myth-maker, there is something at the heart of all of human events that is worth preserving, something marvelous and worthy of renown, even if the account is not entirely true to life... The second-century satirist, Lucian...
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...
In the 1820s, Washington Irving was credited with inspiring the romantic revival of Christmas in America. His Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman relayed sentimental tales of the British holiday with all its romance and traditions. The...
I suspect that our ancestors were better prepared for Christmas than we tend to be. Unless you’re the sort of person who breathlessly anticipates the holy day, like we all did when we were kids, it has...
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...
Christmas gift recommendations are one thing, but what if I took you shopping for all things bookish? In the space of half-an-hour, we can visit five unique shops and spend as little or as much as we like without even buying a book.
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Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Thomas Ascik as he considers three recent books that address the prospects for Christianity in modern American culture. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher
It is the encounter with beauty, all-consuming beauty, the infinite, which directs the human soul back to God. The sky calls us up; the earth drags us down... On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor...
Eric Voegelin
No matter how conservative intellectuals try, they just do not seem able to escape John Locke.
Jonah Goldberg’s well-received Suicide of the West proudly called America’s Declaration of Independence “echoes of” the great...
"I shall no longer ask myself if this or that is expedient, but only if it is right. I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips...
