If anything saves our constitutional republic at this stage it will be Americans’ sheer unruliness, our unwillingness to sit still and be told what to do by people convinced that their scores on entrance exams (or, perhaps, on the squash court) entitle them to organize our lives for us. Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative [...]
Any attempt to interpret history as a whole, if it is not to succumb to gnostic myth, must posit some subject which works in and reveals itself in the whole of history and which is at the same time [the belief in] a being capable of providing general norms. —Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, A [...]
How much folly could have been avoided if our contemporary leaders truly understood the deeper patrimony of ordered liberty? To maintain ordered liberty, our leaders need to gird up and learn to wield the five swords of imagination, because all must be swung simultaneously with trained virtuosity. Kudos to Gleaves Whitney for his insightful and [...]
The whole point of authentic Christian meditation is not just to come to know and love the most divine and loveable of human beings who once walked on this earth. The truth is far more profound, for the very same Christ whom we are coming to know and love in our meditation on his life [...]
Traditional rankings of the American presidents ask whether our chief executives did what was necessary for the good of the country. But should we look to their fidelity to the Constitution as a better way to evaluate their behavior in office? 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to Save Her, by [...]
If we are beginning a journey upon which our whole future depends, it is of paramount importance to understand exactly where we are going. When we begin to pray seriously, St Teresa of Ávila makes it clear that our destination is what she called the Mystical or Spiritual Marriage. If we are beginning a journey [...]
Ernest Hemingway's spiritual sensibilities were the foundation of everything he wrote. Indeed, despite his own weaknesses and flaws, his Catholic spirituality infused his writing. Robert Lazu Kmita: Dear Ms. Mary Claire Kendall, thank you for agreeing to engage in this dialogue. For our readers, I specify that it relates to your recently launched volume, shortly [...]
The music of little-known Baroque composer Francesco Antonio Bonporti embodies a kind of Arcadian serenity and joy, like the music of Mozart. Art conceived along those lines is closely tied to the refinement of the spirit, in which the senses do not go their own brutish way but are reconciled with the mind by means [...]
“The book that explains Trump’s dominance may well have been published in 1962.” Or so contend the editors of the Atlantic Monthly. Amazon apparently agrees, since its blurb to promote current sales of Daniel Boorstin’s The Image borrows directly from the editors of the Atlantic and their leap into an increasingly distant past. But is [...]
If a single descriptor would define conservative activist and scholar, Lee Edwards, it would have to be Lee Edwards, anti-communist. And that would be anti-communism at home and abroad. Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty by Lee Edwards. (378 pages, Regnery, 2024) If the repeated call of the old Popular Front was “no [...]
In the post-Enlightenment world in which we live, we are rarely left alone in peace and quiet. We are continually pushed to do more and to be more and to do so more quickly and efficiently. Traditional works of literature, however, beckon us into a world that is frozen in time yet alive with desire, [...]
The first Jews used the symbol of unquenchable fire to depict the all-consuming power of God’s love. The first Christians, however, believed that this love was now embodied in the Risen and glorified body of Jesus, as he rose from the dead on the first Easter day, and they used the radio-active energy of the [...]
Those who turn the pages of Philip C. Kolin's book of poetry, "Evangeliaries," will be going on a pilgrimage of grace. It is necessary, therefore, to slow down. Poetry, especially poetry this suffused with God’s abundant presence, must not be rushed. It must be savoured in silence. I have recently received a copy of Evangeliaries: Poems [...]
Daniel Fitzpatrick's book "Restoring the Lord’s Day" is, in essence, a diagnosis of the ills of modernity viewed from the aspect of the Sabbath. Lost today are the grandeur and the normative and unitive force of the Sabbath, the center of the life of the individual, the family, and the community. Restoring the Lord’s Day: [...]