The secret of Jane Austen’s genius is that she conceals the most serious of themes within light-hearted tales: true repentance and regret. Our own vanity and egotistical deceptions are revealed, and having been made self-aware, we stop and laugh and realize that our delight has filled us with light. Along with Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited, [...]
Peter Drucker is best known to the world as the author of massive bestsellers in the category of business management. But Drucker thought a lot about such things as totalitarianism, decentralization, limited government, an American type of conservatism, social harmony, the impact of mass production on human beings. A number of readers of this essay [...]
This Advent season does not center on our achievement; it is not the time of puffing ourselves up, but of waiting for God to reveal, as only God can, the new thing under the sun that breaks the great cycle of vanity. The greatest things are born from humility. There is something essentially comic about [...]
What does courage actually look like? Why is it that many who can face mortal dangers in battle lack the other virtues? How do you account for a man like Cicero, whose voice trembled at the beginning of every speech and who never distinguished himself in battle, yet who stood up to Catiline and saved [...]
Excellence predicates aspiration and transcendence, a quest for a higher quality of attainment and, in effect, going beyond the moment. Excellence, which can be defined as the state of excelling and of surpassing merit, is now increasingly one of the lost words of the English language. And increasingly the special qualities that this word denotes [...]
Customs and outward forms signal that one’s duty is greater than one’s self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism. Accounts vary, and a few say that the story about our civil Founders is apocryphal, but it would seem that the story is true. As one of the more jovial national patriarchs, Gouverneur Morris, [...]
Contemporary culture encourages cowardice as the human norm. This new emphasis, including the decade-old insistence on “safe spaces” at colleges, is something more dangerous than anything we might encounter otherwise. Not long ago, I heard a psychologist saying that the most important thing in his practice is the safety of his clients. Understandably, patients in [...]
I have admired only a few men in my life and distrusted the vast majority I have met. Yet there were three men I admired profoundly when I was a child, and these three men serve to this day as models of the man I strive to be. As I mentioned in a recent essay, [...]
C.S. Lewis’ writings are endlessly fascinating because the man himself was endlessly fascinating—to himself as well as to others. He saw life as a sort of drama and art, one in which the will shapes what Providence has so generously provided. One can readily and happily delve into C.S. Lewis’s autobiography of 1955, Surprised by [...]
Most of us have read or heard of the studies that show the mental benefits that come from learning a musical instrument. Such benefits include the development of fine motor skills, opportunity for frequent brain stimulation, improvement in cognition and dexterity, concentration enhancement, and increased neuroplasticity, to name a few. All of these benefits alone [...]
As we attempt to understand Marianne Moore’s baseball poems, it is important to see the contextual influence of her brother and their mutual interest in Pauline Christianity, a tradition they never abandoned. There is some mystery in the space between sport and religion that many Christian athletes inhabit and of which Marianne Moore is the [...]
Albéric Magnard’s music is a happy amalgam of all that was best in Wagner, Franck, and Debussy. The gentle, nostalgic, and somewhat melancholy reminiscence of the past is a key part of his aesthetic and a clear legacy of his Schola Cantorum training. Yet his music is also progressive, looking forward unmistakably to the 20th [...]
History’s tyrants and thieves remain with us, and if things get very dark sometimes, then my best hope is to do the right thing in the light of His Grace. That’s all I can hope to do, passing on that Grace whenever I can. It’s strange how I can’t remember this guy’s whole name but [...]
Winston Churchill’s education deserves close study because it shaped his evolution from unsteady boyhood to rational statesmanship. It was this education that enabled him to exercise discernment and discover what was advantageous and disadvantageous, just and unjust, so that—whether in peacetime or in war—he could demonstrate remarkable qualities and serve the country he loved. Churchill [...]