The Paradox of Choice

By |2024-08-08T09:46:56-05:00December 12th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Economics, Religion, St. Dominic|

Our fundamental mistake is that we conflate freedom with a multiplicity of options. This view of freedom is actually paralyzing—we are enchained by our inability to make a decision. Thankfully, this is not how a Christian is expected to live! Ordering from a lengthy restaurant menu is a frightful experience. Your eyes scan desperately over countless [...]

Religion Without Consequences

By |2023-12-09T13:49:54-06:00December 9th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, John Horvat, Liberalism, Religion|

Consequential religion strikes fear in those who tragically have no faith. When they see that some believe firmly in a loving and Almighty God who takes an active role in worldly affairs, they sense the power of religion, and they suddenly become irrelevant. We live in times of inconsequential religion. That means most people do [...]

“The Miracle of Saint Nicholas”

By |2023-12-05T19:50:28-06:00December 5th, 2023|Categories: Advent, Audio/Video, Christianity, Christmas, Music, Timeless Essays|

French composer Guy Ropartz wrote Le Miracle de Saint Nicolas in 1905, based on a text by René Avril. From the Naxos recording of this work: This legend in sixteen scenes introduces the story, familiar to the people of Lorraine, of St Nicholas bringing back to life the three boys murdered and pickled by the [...]

“I Must Ever Weep”: Haydn’s Musical Elegy to Mozart

By |2023-12-04T17:30:05-06:00December 4th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Friendship, Joseph Haydn, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

When Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5, 1791, fellow composer Joseph Haydn was "quite beside [himself] over his death," and the older composer soon paid a veiled tribute to his young friend in the form of a sombre slow movement of a new symphony he was writing for his London tour. "I love him too [...]

Reaching Into the Silence

By |2024-05-04T15:16:37-05:00December 2nd, 2023|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Cluny, Religion, Theology|

Ours is a restless, noisy, superficial world terrified by silence, enthralled with politics, disdainful of interiority. The modern secular person looks out, perhaps even with pride, at its bleak utilitarian contours, blinking, yet slouching towards metaphysics. But the Catholic humanist, remembering with a certain grateful awe Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight that "the world is charged [...]

Music for Contemplation

By |2023-12-01T21:55:15-06:00December 1st, 2023|Categories: Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors|

The music of the Western classical tradition is known for its dynamism, drama, and rhythmic and intellectual energy. While I value these qualities as much as anybody, more and more these days I find myself gravitating toward music that is contemplative and serene rather than active and developmental—music that makes us content being where we [...]

Warfare in Epic Poetry

By |2023-11-30T18:26:47-06:00November 30th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Civilization, Culture, Heroism, Homer, Iliad, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays, War|

A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]

Charles Peguy on the Hubris of Modernism

By |2023-11-29T18:11:41-06:00November 29th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Modernity, Philosophy, Timeless Essays|

In Western society we are so immersed in and surrounded by the philosophy of modernism, that many are hardly aware of it. Modernism may present itself in various forms. Most recently, some aspects of it seem to have appeared among clergy in the Vatican. It is, therefore, relevant to revisit Charles Peguy’s hard-hitting critique of [...]

The Underground Shakespeare

By |2023-11-27T19:03:58-06:00November 27th, 2023|Categories: Books, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, England, History, Literature, Mystery, Senior Contributors, Theater, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

Despite their obscurity, “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis” were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? Shadowplay, by Clare Asquith, 370 pages,  PublicAffairs, 2018) In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early [...]

Creating Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony

By |2023-11-26T13:41:55-06:00November 26th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, History, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Timeless Essays|

Tchaikovsky's First Symphony is a delight: fresh, assured and just plain fun to listen to. The violins introduce the first movement with a shimmering, sweet tremolo, giving it a dreamy, gossamer texture, that perfectly illustrates the movement’s subtitle, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey." While a longtime fan of Tchaikovsky, I must confess that, up to a [...]

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