Tolkien on Magic, Machines, & Mordor

By |2023-01-02T19:15:49-06:00January 2nd, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Christian Humanism, Conservation, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Modernity, Senior Contributors, Technology, Timeless Essays|

Do we use our increasingly sophisticated gadgetry and expanding knowledge in an elvish, creative, and artful way to foster beauty and truth? Or do we use technology to manipulate, make money, and gain more power in the world? One of the stress points of the modern age is the pace and power of technology. Will [...]

Is Specialization Killing Culture?

By |2022-12-11T16:31:38-06:00December 11th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Civilization, Community, Culture, Michael De Sapio, Modernity, Permanent Things, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Truth, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

If culture is simply a matter of private enthusiasms and hobbies, of small details and specialties, then what of a common culture? What about the collective project and shared sense of purpose that built Western civilization? “The expert takes a little subject for his province, and remains a provincial for the rest of his life.”—Jacques [...]

Beauty: A Necessity, Not a Luxury

By |2023-08-04T09:27:45-05:00November 27th, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Communio, Essential, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Language, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

“Beauty will save the world.” That remains to be seen. But beauty has saved me, and continues to do so. My experience is that I need saving; it is not a luxury. Just when I am about to succumb to the sadness and living death of nihilism, some piercing ray of beauty breaks open my [...]

An Undeserved Nobel Prize in Literature

By |2022-10-24T18:05:19-05:00October 24th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, John Horvat, Literature, Truth|

The world needs works of literature with a moral message that will inspire readers to virtue and bring people closer to God. But today's literature reflects only a debased wasteland. Let there be no Noble Prize for literature until writers can present a moral order that will return to the long-forgotten quest for the good, [...]

Physics, Beauty, & the Divine Mind

By |2022-10-16T14:49:46-05:00October 16th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, George Stanciu, Religion, Science, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Last week, my wife, a painter-friend of ours, who wishes to be anonymous, and I did the Friday night walk down Canyon Road, the site of numerous galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small town that is the third-largest art market in the United States. Halfway down Canyon Road, we stopped in at a [...]

The Quest for the Best: Is it in the Eye of the Beholder?

By |2022-10-14T12:46:03-05:00October 14th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

The more that we learn the language that beauty speaks, which is ultimately the language of the Logos, the more will our subjective preferences converge into the objective presence of goodness, truth and beauty Himself. The claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is an expression of philosophical relativism. It confuses and [...]

Transcendent Vision: Brigid Boardman, Francis Thompson, & R. H. Ives Gammell

By |2022-10-01T18:20:50-05:00October 1st, 2022|Categories: Art, Beauty, Poetry|

I remember the excitement the day the crates arrived and were carefully opened, and what emerged was overwhelming. What was beginning to happen was a unique partnership combining all the art forms: poetry, painting, music, and theater into one evening’s performance. She was British-chilly until I brought out the gin: one ice cube and a [...]

Where Is the Beauty in Buildings?

By |2022-09-12T17:36:47-05:00September 12th, 2022|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Civilization, Culture, Modernity, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Architecture exists all around us all the time. The consequence of bad architecture, therefore, is to make us feel less at home, as if the buildings glare at us as we go about our business, making an urban space into a place where no one feels welcome. So, what are the guiding principles of ‘good’ [...]

The Mysteries of Madness and Genius

By |2022-09-05T14:54:03-05:00September 5th, 2022|Categories: Art, Beauty, Culture, History, Imagination, Marcia Christoff Reina, Philosophy, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself. “A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the [...]

Gifts From We Know Not Where

By |2023-08-26T16:16:16-05:00September 1st, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Essential, Featured, Graduation, Great Books, Homer, Mystery, Odyssey|

We can encourage openness of expectation in ourselves and in one another, so that the mysterious gifts of experience, strange exhilarations and wonders, gifts from we know not where, will not be lost on us. A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. [...]

Kafka’s Scream: Dreaming of a Nightmare

By |2022-08-16T15:37:05-05:00August 16th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors, Truth|

It would be possible to read Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" as a pro-life narrative that invites us to see the dignity of the human person beneath the ugly surface. But such a reading would violate the true spirit of the work which, as the author confesses, is animated by narcissistic self-pity and is an outpouring of [...]

Go to Top