Booker T. Washington might indeed have sought reconciliation between white and black, but his call was truly to members of his own race to educate themselves and to work hard to improve mind and character. Does that make Washington a less successful advocate for racial equality? I first read Up from Slavery ten years ago and [...]
While the evolution of collegiate football was gradual, its rise in popularity was quite sudden—and it all began with Walter Camp, consummate Yale man and watch company executive. Minneapolis lawyer Roger Tamte has now given us the definitive Camp biography… Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football by Roger R. Tamte (408 pages, University of [...]
What George Washington and George Marshall have to say to us has to do most of all with the ethical claims of the virtue of duty. Teachers would ably fulfill their calling if they convey to their students their conviction that civil society is best understood and entered into as a partnership in every virtue, [...]
The apostle Paul counted all things as rubbish except for one thing: an intimate knowledge of Christ characterized by knowing him in the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his suffering, and an identification with his death. Immersion into the life and writings of St. John is a journey into the mind and heart [...]
Through T.S. Eliot’s use of symbolism in “The Journey of the Magi” there is a call to a world beyond words—just as the mystics of historic Christianity beckoned to Eliot from the beginning of his journey. In the summer of 1927, just after his baptism into the (Anglo) Catholic faith, T.S. Eliot wrote “The Journey [...]
The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Some of these were both heroes and giants, and one must include in this number the giant and heroic figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The twentieth century produced many giants and many heroes. Yet many of the giants were not heroes, and many of the heroes were [...]
"Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence…. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an [...]
I love midnight movies, the Golden Oldies; they are the silver-lining of insomnia. Recently I caught part of an old black-and-white movie—Pressure Point—of the days when African-Americans were still called Negroes. Sidney Poitier plays a black prison psychiatrist. At one point his white patron says something about not expecting a Negro to be a successful [...]
In Othello, William Shakespeare, the philosopher of everyday life, holds up a mirror to us and shows us what human beings are capable of. Beneath our most pleasantly cultivated exterior, there often lurks a serpent… William Hazlitt is widely recognized as one of the greatest of Shakespearean critics. Yes, there is Dr. Johnson; yes, there [...]
Noblesse oblige is more than merely being civil. In a Christian context, it treats those less talented or less fortunate without a show of superiority because it recognizes that they, too, are made in the image and likeness of God… What it means to be “civil” has undergone severe scrutiny lately. Hillary Clinton, for example, [...]
Integrity inspires success on the battlefield and in the bureaucracy. Good officers have the mental stamina to find the right thing to do, and they have the moral stamina to do it. The Church will never be reformed until we have Church leaders who are holy, orthodox, and wise… Blessed be the Lord, my rock who [...]
People have been told that Ty Cobb was a bad man over and over, all their lives. The repetition has felt like evidence... Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen (464 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2015) Baseball fans familiar with major league records remember Ty Cobb for his .366 lifetime batting average during the dead-ball era. Some [...]
T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” shows that men do not need more pleasurable escapes or more time, but loving friends and an introduction to reality. They need to listen to human voices instead of the illusive mermaids out in the ocean. And they need to do this before the shock [...]
Up in the heights of the tradition, protected in grandeur and difficulty, are life-giving waters that descend with surprising force into a world thirsty for courage. Yesterday morning, after reading Murder in the Cathedral in preparation for the last sessions at this year’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, I took a long walk up Squaw Creek Road [...]