J.R.R. Tolkien is not only the greatest mythmaker of the 20th century, he is our equivalent of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Just as we read "The Divine Comedy" and come to understand the late Middle Ages, so will someone, five hundred years from now, read Tolkien to understand our era. I’ve had the opportunity to [...]
Gratitude—both gratitude to the human persons around us and the ultimate gratitude toward the personal God—brings to us a sense of order and peace, a grounding in truth that sets us free. Gratitude, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balduin V. Schwarz, Joseph Ratzinger, and Romano Guardini (135 pages, Hildebrand Project, 2023) The great spiritual teachers tell [...]
None of the pieces in this collection are excerpts from David McCullough's many books. And none are culled from anything that might have been on its way to becoming an autobiography. They are simply essays, talks, and musings offered by David McCullough the writer, the student, the artist, and the reader. History Matters, by David [...]
When a lover of poetry as sensitive and intelligent as C.S. Lewis provides us a translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” we should pay attention. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, edited by A.T. Reyes (184 pages, Yale University Press, 2011) Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one [...]
Some would argue that “Moby Dick,” written at the height of his popularity, is Herman Melville’s best work. But his novella “Billy Budd,” written in obscurity and published twenty years after his death, just might surpass his early masterpieces for its concise portrayal of humanity. “The author is generally supposed to be dead,” writes poet [...]
Subjective silence itself is not emptiness. It is attention and receptivity. It is also a light, for the soul is ordered to objective silence, to great mysteries in which we participate. “And as we talked and panted for [eternal wisdom], we touched just the edge of it by the utmost leap of our hearts; then, [...]
Dale Ahlquist's "I Also Had My Hour" stands the art of autobiography on it head so that we can see G.K. Chesterton afresh from new angles, much as Chesterton himself stood truth on its head so that we could see it afresh from new angles. I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. [...]
"You are holding in your hands one of the most important dystopian novels ever written,” claims the introduction to the new edition of Jean Raspail's controversial 1973 novel, "The Camp of the Saints," an alternately brutal and comedic savaging of guilt-ridden Westerners, who allow their civilization to disappear by welcoming mass migration from the Third [...]
Challenging a number of schools of thought in economics and political philosophy, Andrew Willard Jones in his book, "The Church Against the State," presents an unapologetically Catholic and specifically Thomist view of the world and, in particular, of America. Jones argues that America, in her own unique fashion, blends that which is venerable and ancient [...]
Christian higher education is in just as much of a crisis as the rest of the field. The smaller Christian schools are going to have to figure out what differentiates them from the rest of the competition. In most cases, their survival will require a return to the sources of the faith in which the [...]
Fr. Philip Caraman not only epitomized the best of the Jesuit tradition in England, but he also chronicled the legacy of his heroic forebears: the Jesuit missionaries and martyrs of Tudor England as well as the courageous counter-Reformation apostles to the Americas, India, China, and beyond. Philip Caraman Rex Mottram—the Canadian dolt who [...]
The curtain between the world of the living and that of the dead was for Russell Kirk truly thin, as evidenced in his scholarly work and in his fiction. A ghost, as Kirk understood it, was a soul trapped between physical and eternal existence. The curtain between the world of the living and of the [...]
Sportswriter Jane Leavy believes that baseball is in trouble, but she also thinks she knows how to fix it. And yet there is a notion that lurks here and there in her new book: Maybe, just maybe, the game is not fixable—at least not fixable in the sense of its ever being restored to its [...]
In his upcoming book, "Futuristic," Mark Voger explores what might have been had the 1950s and 1960s shaped the aesthetic of space flight and the space age. The book, simply put, is “retro”: a nostalgic celebrations of the Space Age and all its hope and optimism for a better and more humane world. Marvel’s most [...]