Joseph Ratzinger was aware of the central event of modernity, namely the transferal of basic Christian categories from the transcendent order to the political order of this world. Like many classically trained German scholars, Joseph Ratzinger was learned in many spheres of knowledge. He displayed a considerable familiarity with those areas in which he did [...]
How do we acquire knowledge about these deepest of questions? People who accept the Judeo-Christian worldview will accept the validity of both faith and reason as sources of knowledge and paths to truth. These two factors interweave and penetrate each other constantly, and the degree of importance or validity that one assigns to one or [...]
Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight. This sketch of the human story began in [...]
The Nativity is an outrage. God who is outside of time should not step into time. God the omnipotent should not become a helpless child. God the all-knowing should not empty himself and lock himself into the limitations of mortality. However, it is the incredible outrage of it all that gives one pause. After all, [...]
A belief that all that is needed for living or even preaching is the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, has so invaded certain segments of modern American Christianity that an educated man might be looked at with suspicion. J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the [...]
This is an edited version of a conversation between Eva Brann, the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College, and Hamza Yusuf, President of Zaytuna College, recorded in March 2019. You can listen to the full podcast here. Hamza Yusuf: We’re really fortunate today to have with us, I think, one of the treasures of our [...]
A key lesson of Sophocles’ “Antigone” is that fanaticism results when public actors fail to practice the one virtue capable of moderating the excesses of human nature: political prudence. In an insightful essay (“Idolatry in Lockdown,” Law and Liberty, January 28, 2021), Spencer Klavan reflects on the contemporary significance of the conflict at the heart [...]
Last week, my wife, a painter-friend of ours, who wishes to be anonymous, and I did the Friday night walk down Canyon Road, the site of numerous galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a small town that is the third-largest art market in the United States. Halfway down Canyon Road, we stopped in at a [...]
During his final illness, Blaise Pascal often refused the care of his physician, saying: “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” He believed that human beings had been created to suffer. Misery was the condition of life in this world. My uncle made book for a living. That is, he took money from those who [...]
The essence of Rome, by being conscious of one’s cultural debts, is the refusal to make a definitive synthesis or mediation. Only in Rome are there Athens and Jerusalem. Only because of Rome are there “two cities because one remains silently present.” Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is [...]
The new religion of optimism has its orthodoxy and its watchdogs. What is perceived as pessimism, negativity, or intolerance is not only eschewed, it is prohibited; and should anyone dare to voice an opinion that seems in any way not to be tender-hearted, tolerant, and brightly optimistic, he will be hounded, howled down, and cancelled. [...]
Myth can be a fantasy tale full of whimsy and phantasmagorical characters, but true myth is much more than that. It is a tale that is true whether it is factual or not, and when it is both factual and true our eyes and hearts are opened to new realities and our quotidian lives are [...]
People are often ashamed or confused about the idea of wrestling with eternal longing because it means first acknowledging a very specific kind of emptiness, one that can’t be filled by cake or any other earthly pleasure. C.S. Lewis gives his listeners heart by echoing St. Augustine, who said “God gives where he finds empty [...]
In the "Oresteia," Aeschylus examines whether a city exists for proper worship of gods or whether it exists for proper cultivation of “that which is most divine in us.” Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join John Alvis, as he considers Aeschylus' views of the polity as embodied by [...]