I gaze out the window for a few moments, and in that delicious solitude it dawns on me why I dislike museums. The collections are cold and clinical. They have restored and displayed the treasures as a mortician embalms and prepares the corpse for a viewing. The holy pictures have been plucked from their ecclesiastical [...]
Unsure of Indian country in the West, Joseph Smith headed back east, purchasing land on the Mississippi River, north of Quincy, Illinois, in 1839, where the Mormons did exceedingly well. By 1844, the settlement of Nauvoo had become the largest town in Illinois with more than 10,000 people. Smith was at the pinnacle of his [...]
Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]
No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell, who reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee. Helen Choate Bell In the late nineteenth century, a horse-drawn carriage carrying Oliver Wendell [...]
When most people imagine a classical school, they probably think of a K-12 institution with a compulsory Latin curriculum focusing on grammatical analysis and close translation, an integrated approach to humanities that takes inspiration from the Great Books programs developed over the last sixty years, and some compromise with the conventional STEM-orientation in science and [...]
Peter Kwasniewski's "Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence" is one of the most substantive books on the topic of music and the sacred I have read. He leads us on a sort of spiritual ascent from good music (music for enjoyment) to sacred music (music for worship) to the beauty of silent contemplation, arguing that [...]
John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]
Christian theology should always be returning to Scripture, be immersing itself in Scripture, and seeking to understand God and His ways and His will through attention to God’s Word. Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy: Engaging with Early and Medieval Theologians, edited by Bradley G. Green (398 pages, IVP Academic, 2010) Whether you have studied academic theology or not, [...]
Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” is based on the true story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, a community of sixteen Carmelite nuns who were guillotined during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Many hold it in high esteem as one of the twentieth century’s greatest operas. The Metropolitan Opera’s series of High Definition (HD) [...]
My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, [...]
In the wasteland of our contemporary culture, in both the church and the world, students and seminarians would do well to read Tom Howard. His essays will give them a fresh perspective, deeper insights, and a broader vision. Pondering the Permanent Things: Reflections on Faith, Art, and Culture, by Thomas Howard, edited by Keith Call [...]
"Those days have come and gone," says Indiana Jones at one point in the newly-released film, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." And they sure have, for our hero has been emasculated on the altar of political correctness in this film, with an immoral, money-grubbing, narcissistic, feminist character usurping his place. "Those days have [...]
If culture can neither thrive nor survive without religion, then a cultural conservative, which Russell Kirk claims is the most imaginative of conservatives, must fight to preserve the religious foundations of his culture. Apropos of the title of this online journal, I think it appropriate to offer a few Russell Kirk—inspired refections as to what [...]
To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]