“You cannot assume your personal opinions are the truth. This is why we study history: to use the slashing blade of reason like a machete to hack through the dark jungle of false opinion until we see the light of truth”… When Professor Stephen Tonsor had finished his prepared remarks on Christopher Dawson, arguably the [...]
An attendance requirement isn’t just about showing up; it requires attending to what is placed before us with proper focus. We need to be present, to focus on what God calls us to, and to pay attention to those around us… It’s that time of the year when professors like me spell out our classroom [...]
What we need today to re-create the beautiful city, an icon through which to see the glorious City of God, is a new “Iliad,” a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty.” In his Metamorphoses of the City, Catholic [...]
The university is ultimately designed to give students what is needed, rather than what is wanted or merely useful. University administrators should remember the fundamental link among tenure, the possibility of great teaching, and the keeping intact the whole that is the university… University of South Carolina philosopher Dr. Jennifer Frey recently penned an excellent [...]
The ancient Catholic world was rich, colorful, and full of ritual and rumbustiousness. It was the culture of the rough and tumble, blood and glory, lusting and loving, fasting and feasting of the lives of the English people. I was introduced to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when I was a college freshman. Having learned to act [...]
If we truly desire the Benedict Option, then let us not withdraw from modernity, for strategic retreats easily turn into routs. Let us rather engage our neo-barbarian culture by both cultivating our Benedictine identity while also projecting Saint Boniface’s strength. It is the only option. Scratch the soul of many a conservative and beneath you [...]
If there was someone who did not exercise the Benedict Option, it was Saint Benedict himself. The problem with the Benedict Option is that it does not have the substance, unity, and goal of the Benedictine ideal that set the world on fire with the love of God. No one disputes the attractiveness of living [...]
Self-service is often presented as the best of all buying options because it allows individuals to get the exact product they want quickly without interference from others. But by making purchases “easier,” is the buying experience truly enriched?… Self-service is often presented as the best of all buying options because it allows individuals to get [...]
Should one generation ever consider itself greater than any other generation, past or future, Edmund Burke warned in his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France, the entire fabric of a civilization might very well unravel and, ultimately, disintegrate. Our modern ears have no right to discount Burke’s argument as simple hyperbole. What takes centuries [...]
In the 1950s, Robert Nisbet summarized the effects of nineteenth-century individualism on modern humans in the book The Quest for Community: “[Nineteenth-century] individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” His brutally honest assessment is only more true today; our public universities are busy [...]
We are told to be careful with our words, to be aware of how our words might make other people feel, or of how we might be misunderstood. However important is this advice (and it is both important and grossly overused), these are not the primary reasons we should be thoughtful about our language. Words [...]
Is rhetoric simply a fight, or is it part of a feast that is for the good of both the individual and the polis—as a feast is for the sustenance of ourselves, but more importantly, for the communion of a Body, of a community? Callicles says, “‘Too late for a share in the fight,’ so [...]
We face great challenges at this moment in history. We face cyber threats. We face a resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin. We face a jihadi threat. We face the growing threat of nonstate actors, who now can carry out massive attacks and are as able to play on the global stage as state actors. We [...]
In the retrospect of forty years I can see my book, The Quest for Community (first published by Oxford University Press in 1953), as one of the harbingers of what would become by the end of the 1950s a full-fledged renascence of conservatism. There had been authentic and forthright individual conservatives before the 50s; among [...]