There I was, two hours into the eleven-hour flight. Then I heard the piece, the same one I’d been listening to for months, and suddenly I knew right then that my life had been irrevocably altered. I fell in love somewhere near the North Pole one afternoon while kicking back at 35,000 feet. It was sudden, [...]
The liturgy properly offered in a suitable building offers a harmonization of the arts and culture as no other human experience can do... On Advent Sunday last year, we dedicated the new church in our small parish in South Carolina. The impact of worshipping in a beautiful temple rather than a fan-shaped suburban auditorium is [...]
Truth, beauty, and goodness are the terms by which we understand the whole of reality and the terms that give coordinates to all of human life. And so, if you want to live well, you need to know what truth, goodness, and beauty are… I sat down with James Matthew Wilson over a beer after his [...]
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s “Miserere” and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn’t stop the teenaged Mozart. The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, mind [...]
To read the Presocratic fragments is to re-enter a world where the simplest natural phenomena, such as boiling water, can set your bones quaking... To read the Presocratic fragments is to re-enter a world where the simplest natural phenomena, such as boiling water, can set your bones quaking. Today it is a cliche that “opposites [...]
Is it not a fact that day after day and with immense energy and equally immense infatuation we are busy creating a material environment which suffocates the soul of man and causes psychical lesions of an immeasurable and incurable kind? And is it not a fact that we do this in the name of bare [...]
The conduct of the tourists in Florence, as they aimed their smart phone cameras at one great work of art after another and quickly moved on, puzzled me. What was this strange behavior?… It was with mixed emotions that I anticipated a few days in Florence this summer. I had first visited the city thirty [...]
My first conversation with Stephen Tonsor occurred on a mid-April morning in 1987. Already we were talking about a great nineteenth-century historian, the first principles of a European Liberal, and what it all meant to an American conservative… My first conversation with Stephen Tonsor occurred on a mid-April morning in 1987. I was living in [...]
Man's ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.... The capacity to perceive [...]
Art can be a sort of sacrament of the visible, effecting in itself the transfiguration of the world, and manifesting this to transform our attentive senses, hearts, and minds… Art, like philosophy, begins with wonder. Nothing is so surprising as that things exist. Henri Matisse wrote: “One must know how to maintain childhood’s freshness upon [...]
Was it coincidence? Fate? Providence? I could not know what it meant at the time. Yet September 27, 1986, would be my first encounter with the mind of Stephen Tonsor. Author’s Note: At the start of a new academic year, I am inaugurating this series on the most critical phase of my education as a [...]
Oh fairest of the rural maids! Thy birth was in the forest shades; Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky, Were all that met thine infant eye. […]
On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and [...]
Conservatives must once again put contemplation before action, or else their energies will be wasted. They cannot continue to trim the upper branches of politics while the roots of culture wither and die from inattention… There is an aspect to the conservative abandonment of culture I find distressing: the increasing politicization within the conservative movement. [...]