Though probably least known of the books I mention here, Paul Elmer More's "Pages From an Oxford Diary" is a triumph of humility. In it, the great Christian Humanist and Princeton scholar of Plato writes tellingly on his deathbed. Previously, I happily wrote about five of my top ten books—that is, those books that have [...]
According to a brand new New York Times/Siena Poll, every age demographic except one has shifted left over the last several years. The one age demographic that has remained solid and unwavering is my own, Gen X, those ages 45-64. In no way am I surprised that my cohort is the most consistently conservative and [...]
The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]
Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is one of America’s foremost and most important thinkers, especially in the desiccated and mutilated 20th century, an era of horrific inhumanities and incessant blood-letting. Kirk stood for a more humane age that valued the dignity and uniqueness of each human person and that unabashedly sought the good, the true, and [...]
The once-radical belief that Christopher Columbus was evil has sadly become mainstream. But Columbus was a brave and tenacious explorer—flawed, of course, like every man—who expanded the knowledge of the Old World, changing it and the New World forever. Christopher Columbus changed the world. It’s as simple as this. We might argue that these changes [...]
Here are the first five of ten books that radically re-oriented my views of the world, books I go back to time and again. The other day on X/Twitter (I’m never sure what to call it anymore), a social media friend posted that she was in the middle of reading Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1928). [...]
Whatever hells have been loosed upon the world, here in America and abroad, never forget that our ancestors, even pagan ones, called us to love and cherish that which is best. Every autumn, I have the grand privilege of teaching Socrates (the Apology, the Crito), Plato (Book VIII of the Republic, the Timaeus), and Aristotle [...]
A Christian humanist embraces not only the ethics and morality of Socrates and Christ, but he also loves the liberal arts and liberal education as a means to distance oneself from the immediacy and materialism of this world. As a Christian humanist, one seeks the eternal within time. This is part three of a series. [...]
While I see radical elements in the American Founding, I mostly see ways in which the Founding was conserving the best of the classical, medieval, and English past. The American Revolution, as such, did not turn the world upside down, but rather turned the world rightside back. This is part two of a series. See [...]
"The classical understanding of liberal arts as aimed at educating the free human being is displaced by emphasis upon the arts of the private person," writes Patrick Deneen. "An education fitting for a 'res publica' is replaced with an education suited for a 'res idiotica'—in the Greek, a 'private' and isolated person." Dear TIC Reader: [...]
Most of the Inklings had already gone through one world war, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, they knew that their children—especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s sons—would have to go through a second one. It was all quite depressing. In September 1939, war descended upon Europe as the National Socialists of Germany and the international [...]
Only through the right of association can humanity truly progress. Indeed, Dawson wrote, all of history is the struggle between the right of individuals within community and the imperialism of politics. I spent the entire Thanksgiving break in 2001 reading Christopher Dawson, including 1942’s Judgment of the Nations, which remains my favorite of his works. I [...]
Why exactly did Thomas Jefferson and Congress change John Locke’s famous declaration in favor of life, liberty, and property, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Some, wrongly, have believed this to be a Jeffersonian attack on the notion of property. But, as Forrest and Ellen McDonald assure us in their own profound writings [...]
Socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field? At age 58, I can state with utter earnestness that one of the most devastating things of our present age is [...]