Christ likened himself to Jonah, but he also bears resemblance to the whale. Though whaling ships no longer set sail from New London or New Bedford, the whale still remains, plumbing the deep. Though sometimes Christ seems no longer known and honored in the world, he still remains: the king of the sea, the sea [...]
David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]
We are in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued, not only mimesis, but what is perhaps the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing. Theologian Gil Bailie was a personal [...]
There I, a convinced atheist, stood alone in a sandy and windy world, devoid of water, trees, or anything that seemed to be alive. And I couldn’t help but wonder what madness had overcome me. The most fateful university holiday I ever experienced was way back in February 1988. Yes, during that magical and mystical [...]
Sohrab Ahmari’s book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos," makes the sustained case that too much freedom—or rather, too much of the wrong sort of freedom—can be a kind of slavery. The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari (320 [...]
Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]
Moral indolence and apathy, both Babbitt and Weaver stress, must be surpassed if one is to fly beyond the nets of naturalism and temperamental excesses. Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard [...]
As we think about the problems of modernity, let us recognize what the great mid-20th-century artists and thinkers achieved and immerse ourselves in their works. While it is a good thing to react against modern times with the conscience of a conservative, let us do so fully aware of our roots in this most modern [...]
The human heart desires to sing. Enlivened by God, it seeks, at its most basic, to make a worthy return to the Lord in songs of praise and thanksgiving. Language can be beautiful. Order is peaceful and pleasing. The combination of the two—ordered language—gives man the stuff with which to fill his lungs. Down through [...]
While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Essential questions are “untimely” [...]
Arthur Foote’s “cult of the restrained in art,” so well expressed in “A Night Piece,” represents another America, a parallel native culture pushed aside by the “cult of unrestrained expression.” Foote demonstrates that one need not be Aaron Copeland or Leonard Bernstein to be fully American. Nestled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, [...]
The mature music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—the Viennese Classical composers—reflects the best ideals of the Enlightenment in that it embodies rational clarity and order and makes a direct appeal to the listener without undue obscurity. What they produced forms the backbone of a repertoire of music that is recognized and celebrated as some of [...]
Richard Weaver desired to “restore culture,” and countless twentieth and twenty-first century pilgrims have been helped by his wisdom. Many have certainly moved from despair to hope (or from naïve utopianism to a more profound hopefulness) because of Weaver. But to restore “culture” means of course to restore persons. Somewhere along the way, many twentieth-century pilgrims [...]