What is needed in American today are not “hurricane men,” but calm representative figures spread throughout society, who by their example and integrity can lead a nation through the storm and accomplish great things… We have reached a point in our nation’s history where the debate is becoming ever more violent and uncivil. This can [...]
In one, horrible way there really was no difference between those on the Right and those on the Left who sought to provoke violence in Charlottesville: Their consciences were clear, and they believed that violence was justified... Conflict comes in all sizes and flavors. Some are huge like wars between countries and some are very [...]
Education in the liberal arts is an ancient tradition that has slowly been eroded through our increasing attachment to approaching the world scientifically and pragmatically. The language of man reveals something significant about his nature and his relationship with the world. Language is so close to man’s nature that if it suffers a drastic change, [...]
High Art is not going away. There are people who require an art of greater complexity than popular culture usually affords them, who hunger for something deeper, more complex, something that reflects the human experience… There is nothing more American than the Three Stooges throwing a pie in the face of a soprano warbling “Voices [...]
The country appears to be radically divided. We even hear talk of a new kind of civil war. Civic unity depends on an agreed vision of what man is and what the world is. When this agreement is lacking, nothing can really hold that society together… Civility means to act as one would in a [...]
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser [...]
We would be wise to stop using the word culture in ways that undermine respect for the authentic cultivation of the human soul and the human mind… References to “culture” are omnipresent in contemporary discourse, even as the word has lost almost all coherence. A word that used to refer to the demanding cultivation of [...]
No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live. Having a vastly richer interior life, we humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living, and we must recognize the most fundamental principle of human life: By nature every person is meant to love and be loved. I don’t know about [...]
Music assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things. “Music, too, is nature.” —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and [...]
Given the nature of our politically-driven, morality-obsessed middle class society, and its passion for direct action, it follows that the more persons there are who are dedicated to solving problems, the more problems there have to be… The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) Once in a great while there [...]
The terribly fragile fabric of society has revealed itself all too frequently in recent months. Really, for a more than a year now, the social fabric of Western and American society has been rent by sporadic if not quite predictable violence at home and abroad. Whether it’s terrorists driving trucks into innocent crowds in the [...]
To shun wickedness, to care for our souls, and to love one another without looking for rewards, if followed by all, would turn injustice, now a constant companion of human life, into a stranger. In his 2005 masterpiece, Match Point, Woody Allen explores moral failing in a universe governed by chance, or what the protagonist [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien in particular saw with prophetic insight how the Western world was growing increasingly thankless towards its own Rangers: its soldiers and its policemen, its sailors and its marines. How can we so cavalierly patronize, criticize, and denigrate the very officers who risk all to protect us from crime, violence, and unchecked aggression? This [...]
It would be nice to have a rational discourse on the problems associated with globalism, and on the extent to which world leaders, such as Mr. Putin or Mr. Trump, are addressing those problems. But liberal media outlets like The New York Times simply demonize these men in an attempt to silence them... The two so-called [...]