Socrates’ own chief word is ‘eidos.’ Like the word ‘idea,’ it is built on the simple past stem of the word ‘to see,’ which signifies the act of seeing once done and completed. The ‘eidos’ is knowable, but it is not knowledge. It confronts the soul and is not of it. To put it in [...]
The more that Christ is present in the soul of a culture or society, the more will such a society or culture truly reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty of His image. We can see the very pattern of history as a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven, of varying threads which are good, bad, or beautiful. [...]
Even if we dismiss brutalism as a fad perpetrated by blinkered technocrats and egotistical architects, ugly buildings seem to impose an unconscious psychic tax on the great mass of people. So why have we lost the ability to construct beautiful buildings? Few are immune to the architectural charms of Eastern Europe. Prague’s winding streets and [...]
Although The Logos Theatre is a somewhat small apostolate, tucked away in the South, on the buckle of the Bible Belt, far from the madding crowds and the madness and mayhem of Broadway and Hollywood, it punches beyond its weight and, to switch metaphors, it lights candles of joy and beauty, dispelling with the light [...]
Dandelion Wine is a summer read if ever there was one. I know quite a few Ray Bradbury lovers who read it as a summer ritual, and for good reason. From the first moments when we meet Douglas Spaulding, we know his life is one of imagination and adventure. In Dandelion Wine, Doug is tantalized [...]
The Patent Office now houses one of the most splendid collections of American painting and sculpture, housed in an impressive work of architecture. Our national character has never been solely about commerce and machinery; from the beginning we have made fine achievements in art and the imagination. “Among the Sierra Nevada, California,” by Albert [...]
The poet and the bard hold the sacred office of priest, bridging the transcendent with the everyday. I believe it our duty as conservatives to cultivate these habits once again. It is not enough for us to praise the poet, we must support the poet. Of our living poets—to my mind—no greater one exists than [...]
Beauty demands that we celebrate order with creativity, surprise, and freshness. We are meant to be startled by the goodness of reality, astonished by things working the way they’re supposed to, and delighted by the truth. Let us suppose there is such a thing as objective beauty. Suppose, along with the classical and Christian traditions, [...]
When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]
My friends of the future, you may think that the arts have changed radically between my age and yours, but they have not. The relationship between form and content remains constant and must ever be honored and obeyed if one is to earn the title of poet. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, [...]
If we would take frequent respite from the transient world of becoming, we should read more books. In reading, we convene mind to mind with our fellow subcreators and walk through a world that calls universals to mind and plants images of them on our subconscious. We live in an era of escape. The political [...]
Falling in love with French composer Gabriel Fauré’s Nocturne No. 4 wasn’t one of those thunderclap experiences. It crept up on me, gradually. I’d been listening to this Fauré Nocturne CD for almost a decade, mostly as I drove, and enjoying the music’s understated elegance and beauty. Then, this past year, something clicked with No. [...]
Some adages are so well-worn by constant use and abuse that they are considered truisms. We begin to assume that they are true without really thinking about them, making truth itself both trite and trivial. One such adage is the belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Such a belief makes beauty [...]
The great Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This is so wonderfully true that, if we have eyes opened in humility, we can see God’s grandeur shining forth in all that is truly beautiful in Creation. We see it in the multifarious shades of [...]