I urge “imaginative conservatives” to use their imagination in selecting what they choose to read. Instead of wasting time with the toxic triteness of New York Times bestsellers, we need to reward the courage that adventurous publishers are showing by buying and reading the new and adventurous works that they are publishing. For almost a [...]
For the past quarter of a century I’ve been honoured to edit the St. Austin Review, popularly known as the StAR, a Catholic cultural journal, published six times a year. The StAR was launched in September 2001, the month of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. It appeared in the midst of that darkest of months as [...]
Richard Wagner’s legacy has been overshadowed, and some would say permanently marred, by the manner in which he became the poster child of Hitler’s grotesque Third Reich. Yet should we condemn his music for this reason? Nice to see your music selections. But Wagner, your favorite composer! Say it ain’t so, Joe! The above-quoted words [...]
The legacy of great Catholic literature that England had bestowed upon civilization might have seemed to have died out by the end of the eighteenth century, but the apparent death of Catholicism was merely the prelude for a spectacular resurrection. It is often forgotten that the Catholic presence in England is older than England itself. [...]
As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]
Throughout the centuries Spain has done more than any nation to fight the Long Defeat and, in her heroism, has shown us many fleeting glimpses of the Final Victory. The poet Roy Campbell declared that Spain was “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul.”[i] Received into the Catholic Church in [...]
If the twenty-first century is to produce more great men and more great books, it will have to restore a true education; and a true education is an education as if truth mattered. The title of this essay, “Education as if Truth Mattered,” is taken from the subtitle of Christopher Derrick’s book, Escape from Scepticism: [...]
A friend of Christendom and of civilization in an age of decadence and barbarism, Hilaire Belloc thundered against the heresies of his age and defied the storms of war and secularism. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) is not as well-known as he and his talent deserve. From the last years of the reign of Queen Victoria until [...]
A few years back, a film, The Act of Killing (2012), ran at a London cinema for 52 weeks. Such a run is unusual for any film: even more so for a documentary feature about Indonesia. The film’s subject matter revolves around one man, Anwar Congo, who is convivial, charming even, and with real screen [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien believed that the Anglo-Saxon world might offer us strength to redeem Christendom. The hero of “The Lord of the Rings,” after all, is an Anglo-Saxon farmer turned citizen-warrior. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Bradley J. Birzer, as he discusses J.R.R. Tolkien’s christological interpretation of [...]
What makes Gilbert Keith Chesterton so wonderful is that he is full of wonder. He doesn’t merely see trees, or clouds or sky; he sees glorious creatures charged with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the grandeur of God. He sees that seeing is itself a miracle. “Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,” he [...]
The great fruit of C.S. Lewis’s clarity is that he shows his readers that the great truths are knowable through the application of pure and simple common sense. He makes the truth seem so obvious and so inescapable that we feel that we must always have known it, at least subconsciously. Some time ago, during [...]
It’s difficult to know where to start or finish in any discussion of the connection between American literature and the Catholic Faith. The whole topic is fraught with complexity, as is the relationship between the American nation and the Catholic Faith, or American history and the Catholic Faith. There are few American writers who are [...]
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is about a man who leads others, however obliquely, and despite obstacles, both external and internal, to faith. Faith is faith. Without it, man is deprived of any spiritual roots. He is like a blind man. Just more than thirty years ago, on 26 April 1986, a nuclear disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear [...]