Thomas Honegger Born in Zürich (Switzerland) in 1965, Dr. Thomas Honegger is a specialist in Medieval Germanic languages and a noted Tolkien scholar. After completing all levels of academic training at the University of Zürich, where in 1996 he earned his doctorate with a thesis entitled Animals in Medieval English Literature, he worked [...]
White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost [...]
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and [...]
The way of humility leads, via the rolling road of wonder, to the heaven-haven of the reward. The way of pride leads, via the thorny path of prejudice, to a hell of one’s own devising. “For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” In Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the [...]
Western Civilization is undeniably in decline and indeed its very existence is in doubt. Yet these thoughts ought not to drag conservatives down into a morass of defeatism. Though the hour is late, a remnant must run to the barricades and shield itself and whatever is left of Western Civilization from the barbarians at the [...]
Each of us, in the face of an atrocity, can only pray to the Madonna with the Sword-Pierced Heart, seeking the mercy of her Son for sinful humanity and seeking to share in her sorrow for those innocent victims of man’s inhumanity to man. And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien poured his heart and deepest sense of what “right” reality meant into his subcreative work. His world of Middle Earth is based on monarchy, tradition, obscure and yet profoundly meaningful rituals involving sacred and elevated languages. It is peopled by kings and peasants, wizards and sorcerers. Its economy is distributist. The men of [...]
Shortly before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar addressed the question posed by many of those disconcerted by the large number of his books: Where must one start to understand him? Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997) Hans Urs von [...]
We need to return to first principles and to the most important questions one could ever ask: What is man? What is God? And, what is man’s relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does not pretend to know the answer to each of these questions, but he knows the questions must [...]
We are made for the stars but rooted in the soil. We are made to seek spiritual realities, but we must use this world, this visible creation, to do so. How the brief life of a storied liberal arts program changed lives the world over. In 1967, at the age of forty-four, John Senior transferred [...]
All natural loves, even love of the land, must suffer death and burial in the raw world and the winter of this life. But Hilaire Belloc, who “received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty” of his native Sussex at night, was confident that he would see it and his departed friends face to [...]
Fr. Michael Ward believes that each of the seven chronicles of Narnia can be seen to echo the seven planets of medieval cosmology in their themes, characters, and mood. In The Narnia Code, Father Michael Ward has abridged and made more accessible Planet Narnia, his doctoral thesis on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s “The Contrast” is a neglected study of America and Europe after the Great War. His sadness over the utter failure of Europeans to embrace their cultural patrimony and stand independently explains his later sympathy for Franco and Salazar, and his initial interest in Mussolini. The unimaginative always place a wall of separation between [...]