People who read books of this kind usually expect the author to answer the question: “Why did you become a Roman Catholic?” I am not trying to explain it, but I must try to illustrate it by an example. It was as if I had been a man homeless and needing shelter, who first of [...]
Trevor Cribben Merrill’s 2020 debut novel, "Minor Indignities," is a student-centered novel set at a place that seems suspiciously like Yale in the early-mid-nineties. It's a world in which young, smarty-pants kids compare their personal libraries, think a new used bookstore is exciting, actually read books, have to open up a computer to send an [...]
Westerners today ought to meditate upon Montesquieu’s admirable reflections whenever they decide to launch a war of humanitarian intervention. These reflections especially call into question the institutionalization and systematization at work in contemporary demands for international justice. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu effected a revolution, one that called into question the character of Christian [...]
Peco Gaskovski’s "Exogenesis" has been described as “Blade Runner meets the Benedict Option." In the novel, a thousand-mile metropolis named Lantua has emerged from the collapse of the USA. Artificial birthing and strict reproductive control is enforced with hi-tech social conditioning, 24-7 monitoring by the state, and the total loss of freedom, disguised by smooth [...]
God is the complete satisfaction of our need to know and to love. He is all Truth, utterly lovable. But God must be known for what He is, else an appropriate response to Him cannot be made. Philosophy and theology tell us, but not so effectively as does Dante, who has made us see what [...]
Walter Lippmann believed that Natural Laws are the principles of right reason and behavior in the good society governed by Western traditions of civility. It is possible to organize a state and conduct a government on quite different principles, but the outcome will not be freedom and the good life. Thus the environment with which [...]
There is more to Southern life than moonlight and magnolia. It presumed, in fact, an affection for the literal world justified by its origin, history, and destiny, infused with its own providentially given meaning and value. It was not a perfect society, to be sure. But it had at its core something which deserves respect. [...]
Though a self-described "man of the left," Christopher Lasch was once and always a populist. By the end of his life, he was concerned with the rise to power of American elites who, as of the mid-1990s, were already alien to—and divorced from—the masses of ordinary American citizens. The Revolt of the Elites and the [...]
In the annals of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that have become established as models due to tone, insightful content, and excellence of style. The most recent historical work by Jacques Barzun is such a work. It is a cultural history of the highest standard. As a historical volume of such scope, [...]
“I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years,” Mark Twain said, “and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. They drew a picture of a peasant. But they always missed the face—the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful [...]
“Of all these sports,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1893, “there is no better sport than football.” As in many things, TR was on the cutting edge of cultural opinion in the United States, as it was about to takes its place among the powers of the world. That he too often conflated football and world [...]
It is easy to understand why skeptical New Testament scholars have relegated the magi from Matthew’s gospel to the realm of fantasy. Were they fanciful figures from the imagination of Matthew, or historical figures who existed at the time of Christ’s birth? Every good fantasy story needs a magician. Dorothy encounters the Wizard of Oz. [...]
Myth, J.R.R. Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that is intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures. But, Tolkien admitted, myth can be dangerous if it remains pagan. Therefore, one must sanctify it. To enter faerie—that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation—is to open oneself to [...]
The Miracle of the Bells doesn’t claim to be great literature, but it is a richly-drawn story about faith and Hollywood, a time capsule of a bygone era that retains its inspirational charm. The Miracle of the Bells by Russell Janney (510 pages, Forgotten Books, 1946) Back in 1947 it was possible for a Catholic novel to [...]