The absence of beauty in education robs students of their natural curiosity, intuition, and creativity. Beauty provides direction, order, and harmony. Humans are made to desire and perceive beauty, which itself is the mystery of God. Professor Margarita Mooney of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Scala Foundation is a dear friend and brilliant academic. Five [...]
If we are to recover “the moral ideal” and if we are to be reconsecrated to the life of the spirit, we are in urgent need of an unconditional conservatism: lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic. [...]
Decadence ultimately entails the process of falling away from the vision that orders man's relation to the divine, to the community, to the self, to nature. In the Western context, it signifies a lessening of the hold on the imagination of all that inspires human beings to be devout. Through the ages the death of [...]
Andrew C. Johnston’s “The Sons of Remus” provides a window into not only how European identities were formed, but how all societies engage in a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation in determining who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain, by [...]
In the Gospel, we see neither the dominance of man over beast nor worship of the awesome ocean swell. Rather, nature moves these fishermen to something greater—Jesus Christ, the power of God, the wisdom of God, the author of all nature. There’s nothing like a good fish tale. Man grappling with nature. The allure of [...]
The modern, brutalist church architects were really driven not by a desire for authenticity, but by a modernist, iconoclastic ideology. The old world with its fancy churches, lacy vestments, precious art, and Mozartian masses was out. This was a modern world of factories, public housing—a world of steel and concrete, concrete and steel. Notre-Dame [...]
The life of Venerable Dom Prosper Guéranger, a Benedictine monk, is truly one of rebuilding the Church from the ruins of the French Revolution and the lingering corruption of the Gallicanism which preceded it. In an age of great disintegration, Guéranger can be a model of rebuilding for all of the faithful. July 11 is [...]
It was claimed that the past would cease to matter amid the restless rush of progress. This has not happened. Instead, the wonders of technology and research have made the past more prominent than ever before. In light of all this, I want to ask a simple question: Is this recapitulation, this summing up of [...]
In 1900, Jean Sibelius revised his patriotic tone-poem, “Finlandia,” and its popularity grew in leaps and bounds. Suddenly the world knew about Sibelius, “Finlandia,” and Finnish national pride. Jean Sibelius Jean Sibelius’ tone-poem, Finlandia, wasn’t supposed to be the program headliner that Saturday night at the San Francisco Symphony. The main draw was the Sibelius Violin [...]
Though Handel continues to loom large in the world of classical music, he is valued for a small portion of his tremendous body of work—mainly "Messiah" and a handful of other pieces. But I continue to find fresh gems from this composer who, for all his fame, is not really all that well known. I [...]
Today in America, people of faith are binding up the unraveled fabric of civil society in tangible ways. We hold the threads individually, but when they are bound together, we can reweave a picture of order and beauty in human souls, woven in the vibrant colors of love. People of faith have given our culture [...]
Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how? St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only [...]
In the few decades after Dostoevsky wrote "Demons," revolution spread across Russia in a wave of chaos which has yet to end. All cultures and all eras face a similar trial. We can look at the America of our time with Dostoevsky’s eyes—with a similar worry and yet with a similar hope. Demons: A Novel [...]
I started out for Florence in the morning in a state of feverish excitement, and the recollection of the sights of that day makes it difficult to write even now. We drove down the hill from San Casciano to the Greve valley with a sense of overwhelming tragedy. The destruction of Florence seemed the end [...]