Today Christians of all stripes are responding in defense of the embattled family, but our eventual success will be enabled by the image of the Madonna, the Mother of God, especially as the "Stabat Mater," the Mother standing beneath the cross of her bruised and broken Son, suffering more than any other human creature has [...]
How can we rebuild culture and community in a world where we seem to be glued together in pragmatic tribes, looking across the divide at deadly enemies? One answer is to rediscover the parts of life that make up the whole of a healthy community, and what better way to embark on our study of [...]
We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people. As I get older, I’m terribly troubled by the move—going on since rise of the New Left and, especially, the Maoists who introduced us to Political Correctness in [...]
I encourage those who smoke to light a cigar in solitude or with a band of brothers. Recite a poem out loud or in the confines of your soul. Rejoice, reflect, and ponder over the mystery of our faith in Jesus Christ. What is a cigar to a man if not a sacred companion? Never [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
The ultimate job of the teacher is to help orient students to and deepen their intimacy with reality itself. And the indispensable condition for a teacher being able to do this is not expertise, experience, knowledge, or pedagogical technique, however important these are, but literally being in love with the good. How do we enable [...]
Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
Public screens and background music are a form of theft. They are a way of enclosing common spaces. They ordain a mood and mandate a climate, which would not be so bad, if making a climate was not a particular (and wonderful) power of each and every man. My wife and I have a wonderful [...]
The sun rose steadily over main street in the mornings. The air was cool and light. The sky was clear. City workers watered the flowers on the lampposts. An older man sat on a bench and read the newspaper, and a young mother rocked her baby gently. A father held his little girl’s hand, and [...]
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 problem of authority is not merely a political problem or even simply a problem of faith. It instead requires a gathering up of the whole of life, indeed the world in all of its rich multitude of aspects, in relation to its meaning-granting center. Anxious about trends he was witnessing in the ’60s and [...]
Timothy Carney’s "Alienated America" tackles a crucial question that too few policymakers and news commentators even bother asking anymore: What is at the root of America’s contemporary cultural and social malaise? The short answer, according to Mr. Carney, is the deterioration of civil society. Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Other Places Collapse, by [...]
Why did I help organize a new men’s event? Well, the short answer is that it’s needed. Much contemporary Christian life is dominated by women, for good and for ill. One of the ill parts of this is that there is a certain feminized quality to many events that turns men off. Our catchy name [...]
Solitude. It is a word that is coming to define the 21st century, so says Derek Thompson in his recent article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century.” Citing statistics from the American Time Use Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the article focuses on how Americans have, over the past several decades, gained [...]