Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]
Though civil libertarians rightly point out the dangers of an unchecked government, they blissfully ignore the dangers of an unchecked, unrestrained populace. It is thus worthwhile to return to the founders and examine what role they desired religion and morality to play in their new Republic. The story goes that as Benjamin Franklin departed from [...]
The spiritual life (including the prayer and rites of religion) and the cultural life (including the artistic and intellectual cultivation of the human person in its countless forms) together ensure that life is more than a blind cycle, a march leading nowhere. They reveal the sense of our pilgrimage and light a path to our [...]
Seashore towns once played the same conservative role as American farms did, but by the end of the twentieth century, man took to coercing nature in order to protect his ocean playground. The Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States serve as a home to the Union’s great cities and to a majority of [...]
In the “David,” we see what Christian humanism can accomplish, and in contemplating the gigantic little boy we can remember that God always uses the little things of the world to confound the mighty. Last week I was in Florence, and while jostling with other sightseers to get a glimpse of Michelangelo’s David, I recalled [...]
“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and [...]
“He alone has the secret of making me smile and touching me to the bottom of my soul,” Mozart said of Joseph Haydn. It is a dizzying prospect to explore the vastness of Haydn’s delightful musical creations. But here are some starting points. Quite unjustly, he stands in the shadow of his young friend, Wolfgang [...]
Baseball has an essence that mirrors the heavenly city and the precision of creation better than other sports. Its calmer nature also embodies that sense of tranquility which the restless heart seeks. The baseball season has arrived. America’s pastime sport returns, like Persephone from her bondage in Hades, to signal the return to life that [...]
George Orwell’s "1984" was so successful and so influential that he was seen as something of a prophet. This dystopian novel was considered a cautionary prophecy of what would come to pass if future generations ceased to be vigilant in the guarding of their freedom. Someone to claim us, someone to follow Someone to shame [...]
It would be wrong to compare the Mass too closely to a stage production, but in a traditional celebration of Mass there is what I call a “compendium of culture”: a combination of art, architecture, literature, logic, rhetoric, drama, poetry, metalwork, textile art, and woodwork. Why does this matter? It matters because matter matters. The [...]
"Blood on the Risers" is an American paratrooper song from World War II. Sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," the song tells of a fatal training jump of a rookie paratrooper whose parachute fails to deploy, resulting in him falling to his death. Each verse describes the man’s death and [...]
C.S. Lewis believed that every nation possesses what he called a “haunting,” a “Logres,” which baptizes it with a unique inner life. What, or where, is America’s Logres? Who is the mythological hero that could guide the American identity the way Arthur guided Britain and inspired generations of English poets and artists? During my undergraduate [...]
Moral imagination is capable of grasping truth and goodness in ways that move us passionately to live in those objective realities. The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that [...]
The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen [...]