As one awaits renewal, the figure of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the integration of faith and culture which he achieved in his life and in his work guide wayfarers in that dark night, a beacon of light pointing the way to spiritual renewal of the culture—a light, which Balthasar himself would no doubt be [...]
Macbeth loses his head and soul in the unknowing clouds of his own sin-deceived ego. So does Nietzsche. Far from seeing life as a quest for truth, they are left with nothing but their own bitter inquest on life, “signifying nothing”. This is the “deepest consequence” of their rejection of faith and reason. I’ve recently [...]
The Nazi Empire fell. The Soviet Empire fell. And now a new globalist empire is in the ascendant. It will also have its day, its pride preceding its own fall, but who knows how much damage will be done before it comes crashing down? In my recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative, “Bad Ideas Have [...]
The Enlightenment's misreading of man and history has led to a reductionist understanding of human society. This, in turn, has led to the reduction of the human person to that of being a mere subject, or dare we say, guinea pig. The consequences of such a bad idea are clear enough. It leads and has [...]
Henri de Lubac distilled Dostoevsky’s importance to our own times: "Yes, Dostoevsky was a prophet: because he not only revealed to man the depths that are in him but opened up fresh ones for him, giving him, as it were, a new dimension; because, in this way, he foreshadowed a new state of humanity." For [...]
The Latin Mass has never been central to my own experience of the Church, though I respect those for whom it is, including many of our students. The point seems to me that our effort should be to seek the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and to keep intact both word and [...]
Without a deep religious faith, Whittaker Chambers could hardly have made his stand against Communism and, in fact, almost failed to do so. “The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.” —Stepan Trofimvovitch, in The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is the [...]