Jon Lauck's "The Good Country" is an extraordinary book, a celebration of the good, the true, and the beautiful as well as a revelation of the deepest flaws in American history. One comes away from reading it with immense energy to follow its creatively conservative paths. The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, [...]
If we approach history through the lens of a twenty-first-century secular liberal, we will necessarily see history as a series of events that conform to the labels and forms of secular liberalism. We will be limited in what we see in the past and, thus, necessarily limit what we can propose for the future. In [...]
Gerald R. Ford took office at a time when “we didn’t need to look into the future but assure ourselves we had one.” And though biographer Richard Norton Smith argues that Ford was not a visionary, he did recognize the “long-term consequences of a public sector growing faster than the private economy that sustained it.” [...]
"Witness" is a brief against the “dying civilization” that was the United States of the Jazz Age. The America of F. Scott Fitzgerald, flappers, and general frivolity was dying? The young Whittaker Chambers vaguely thought so at the time. The mature Chambers of "Witness" was convinced of that. Whittaker Chambers “Man without mysticism [...]
“The Cellar of Little Egypt” is among the least appreciated of Russell Kirk’s many ghost stories. It is a tale about how businesses can be corrupted from internal forces, and it offers businessmen a shot of moral imagination. “The Cellar of Little Egypt” is among the least appreciated of Russell Kirk’s many ghost stories. Kirk [...]
I urge good men everywhere to read "The Woman Who was Poor" by Léon Bloy, a master of the art of darkness, which shows the ugliness of sin and illustrates its destructive consequences. His novel is indeed a masterpiece of the genre. It is said that all is necessary for the triumph of evil is [...]
We can give those things God has asked, Fr. Leonard Klein asserted, for “He has not abandoned us; he has given us life and gifts in this place and this time, for this place and time.” The attentive reader will find that his sermons are a great aid to thinking through what holy living means [...]
Alexander Salter’s "The Political Economy of Distributism" is a much-needed scholarly work on the ideas of distributism, as presented in the writings of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Written in such a way that it will pass muster in the ivory towers of academe, it is also accessible for any reader interested in politics and [...]
Ever since the first stir they created in the early 1930s the Southern Agrarians have been difficult to assess. How serious, politically and economically, were they in what they advocated? How much agreement was there among them? The four collected above papers point up and even accentuate their divergence, investigating wide-ranging and, at least on [...]
Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, [...]
In a recent essay, Veronique de Rugy focuses her ire on Alexander Salter, author of a forthcoming book entitled "The Political Economy of Distributism." She apparently seeks to discredit the book by discrediting its author as an admirer of the "antisemitic" Hilaire Belloc. This is really all too silly to be taken seriously. We live [...]
Why is it that wherever the gospel goes the academy follows? What does the gospel have to do with the mind? I have tried—across five major themes—to delineate something of the relationship between the Christian vision of God, man, and the world and the intellectual life. The two theses I have argued are: 1. The [...]
Thankfulness to God who offers friendship is the sine qua non of eucharistic living. Thankfulness for and attention to our old friends make us open to new friends whom God will place in our lives. In that way, our friendships here prepare us for heaven. Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human (173 [...]
The story of Riccardo Bacchelli’s classic novel "The Gaze of Jesus" is seen through the eyes of one man who had suffered the gaze of Jesus and had suffered its consequences. The man in question is Ithamar, who is better known to readers of Scripture as the Gerasene demoniac, from whom Christ had exorcized the [...]