David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]
We are in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued, not only mimesis, but what is perhaps the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing. Theologian Gil Bailie was a personal [...]
George Weigel asks his readers to “reimagine” Vatican II and examines whether it is true that the Council prescribed a fatal concession to the modern world, which according to the disaffected should be “repudiated or quietly buried.” If such is thought about at all, the legacy of Vatican I seems firmly place. Pope Pius IX [...]
More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry's vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him. The [...]
Theodore Roosevelt was the obvious victor in both of the “battles to transform American capitalism.” He refused to do the bidding of the coal operators and instead helped engineer a compromise. American capitalism was not so much transformed as tamed in the process. The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and the Battle to [...]
As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I’m too Christian for Harold Bloom’s blessing. So be it. [i] The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been blamed and broken and half-blinded by the [...]
Sohrab Ahmari’s book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos," makes the sustained case that too much freedom—or rather, too much of the wrong sort of freedom—can be a kind of slavery. The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari (320 [...]
The human heart desires to sing. Enlivened by God, it seeks, at its most basic, to make a worthy return to the Lord in songs of praise and thanksgiving. Language can be beautiful. Order is peaceful and pleasing. The combination of the two—ordered language—gives man the stuff with which to fill his lungs. Down through [...]
T.S. Eliot certainly possessed creative courage, but he also possessed, as Russell Kirk demonstrates better than any other commentator, a consummate spiritual courage. This confluence of creative and spiritual courage finally permits Eliot to attain his greatest visionary moment in his composition of "Four Quartets." Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in [...]
József Cardinal Mindszenty's memoir is an epic of the great suffering of the Hungarian nation and of this man’s participation in it, out of his love for his people, his Church, and his God. In addition to the cruelties of totally repugnant totalitarianism, he endured abandonment by the Church, culminating in heartbreaking treatment by the [...]
There is only one standard by which any epoch can be fairly judged: In view of its own peculiar circumstances, to what extent did it allow for the development of human dignity? The medieval achievement was so magnificent that it stands with the loftiest moments of human history. The most complete ordering of medieval life [...]
Political philosopher that he is, Patrick Deneen is preoccupied with the eternal question of the few versus the many. How to balance their interests? How to reconcile their differences? He hopes that a “mixed regime” will force the few and the many to learn from each other, while correcting the abuses and excesses of each [...]
Avellina Balestri's "Saplings of Sherwood" has as its setting the area surrounding Sherwood Forest during the years when Robin Locksley and Maid Marian were children and later teenagers. This is a truly masterful piece of storytelling and as near to the real or legendary Robin Hood as any of us is likely to get. There [...]
Peter Kwasniewski's "Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence" is one of the most substantive books on the topic of music and the sacred I have read. He leads us on a sort of spiritual ascent from good music (music for enjoyment) to sacred music (music for worship) to the beauty of silent contemplation, arguing that [...]