The seven pillars of Western Civilization are the edifying edifices which tower over the landscape of the centuries as a fortress of faith and a beacon of reason. Islam has served throughout the centuries as an outside force which has repeatedly laid siege to the fortress, seeking its overthrow. Several weeks ago I wrote an [...]
Ask someone who’s seen the 1940 animated film, Fantasia, which piece they best remember, and the majority will respond with, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or “the one with Mickey Mouse.” (Runners up might include Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, but that’s an essay for another time.) Now ask [...]
What makes this election year so strange is a greater shift away from reality. The election seems like a show, not a civic duty. Candidates are more like actors than future public servants. It all seems so staged. Everything is choreographed to improve poll numbers and ignore issues. However, the main reason things are surreal [...]
The American musical—more technically known as light musical theater—has been one of the most beloved aspects of American culture. Many of the characters, scenes, and situations from the musical shows created during the genre’s golden age (roughly, the mid-20th century) are fixed in our consciousness, thanks to stage productions, movie versions of the shows, and [...]
As we dispense with religious institutions, beliefs, and practices—as we dispense with God Himself in the ridiculous belief that we are enough on our own—we leave ourselves open to barbarism within and a more overt barbarism from without. Anyone who knows anything about the Judeo-Christian tradition (an increasingly small group, I know), is aware that [...]
For Dawson and Kirk, St. Augustine served as both the lodestar in confronting the evils of the world and as a means by which the modern traditionalist should navigate in turbulent ideological waters. One would be hard pressed to find a greater influence on two of the finest Catholic Humanists of the twentieth century, Christopher [...]
When trying to understand Scripture, we need to establish an analysis of concrete terms. But if we aren’t careful, we just might explain away the beauty of descriptive language in the Bible. Saint Augustine of Hippo encountered the same issue, and not just among his youngest students. In humanities coursework, we often train students to [...]
Two composers, two works, separated by four centuries, and the way Ralph Vaughan Williams managed to blend the two sensibilities is amazing. And here I am, listening today, and it takes me on a journey, not just to 1910 when the "Fantasia" was composed, but back to the time of Tudor England when Thomas Tallis [...]
There are few twentieth-century intellectual figures to whom one might apply the adjective “essential.” One of the earliest is Paul Elmer More, perhaps the last century’s greatest Christian apologist. The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition. —Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” in Norman Forester, Humanism [...]
It would be far too easy to see this life as merely a vale of tears—a time of trial we must experience and through which we must suffer with such virtue as we can muster, so as to reach a higher reward in the next life. What then could possibly make this life, on its [...]
Art has the twin functions of reflecting a culture and shaping it. The problem that contemporary artists face is a difficult one: how to express meaning to a world that has become culturally over-stimulated by the spectacular, the hyper-sexualized, and the dumbed-down by inanity, and which has increasingly become antagonistic to manifestations of Christianity. “We [...]
What do we make of the four “Almost Sacraments”? Among other things, we might note how they bear upon a common interest that is, sadly, more and more neglected in today’s Church: young men. How many sacraments are there anyway? Seven? Two? Two-and-a-half? If you are Roman Catholic today, your Church has handed down this [...]
Surely it is a noble desire to try to create a heaven on earth, to make a paradise in this valley of tears, but that is an end that ultimately requires the denial of the reality of human existence. We are fallen, we are mortal, we are not meant to end in perfecting this created [...]
The HBO series “Chernobyl” serves to warn us about the danger of persistent lies in a society that refuses to acknowledge truth. It would be a grave error not to take stock of our own tendencies toward deceit, as if our lies are radically different from those that underpinned the Soviet Union. Over several long [...]