So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir's film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated...
Whereas heroic missionary effort and martyrdom seemed the hallmark of the first Jesuits, the second generation moved in a different direction...
In the Roman calendar, October is a harvest for militant saints. Kicking off with Saint Therese of Lisieux...
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender...
Despite the number of times the witches repeat “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Macbeth testifies to the objectivity of natural law and universal knowledge of good and evil known to conscience and written on the heart and mind of all persons...
Except for mystics, the goal of Western philosophers and theologians has been to find the right ideas, whereas Eastern thinkers seek the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things. I wish to suggest that the Western and Eastern paths to the true,...
Machiavelli can enter public debate not merely as a wicked man concerned only with power and political maneuvering, but as a philosopher with myriad insights to offer modern politics, politicians, and even apolitical members of the public...
Be Like...
Friedrich Nietzsche has no explanation for the process by which Christianity conquered Rome, by which the strong accepted the morality of the weak. When it comes to a depth of understanding of the development of Christianity, William Shakespeare is the true superman...
Much of suffering is an impenetrable mystery. But to a limited degree, we are able to understand suffering if we can come to understand what love is...
Pope John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris,...
The abuse of opioids, like other addictions, stems from a profound spiritual problem deep inside the souls of countless Americans. But when people turn to the sublimity of heavenly things, they acquire the ability to overcome their frenetic appetites and look for spiritual solutions...
Exacting self-examination should promote more realistic expectations in politics and life generally. If we are more honest with ourselves, we may understand that we are not trying to change the world but rather, ourselves...
The end of the scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship. The end is never the production of a work of art, however grand in conception, successful in execution, or exquisite in finish; but the realization...
The core of René Girard's thought seems to center around the fundamental conviction that mimetic desire is the desire for God...
In a recent essay in this journal, Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski makes the bold...
It is our loss that Amos Kendall, who helped Andrew Jackson rid government of corruption, remains to this day one of the least known of all nineteenth-century American statesmen...
Of all of those in his informal circle...
The soft totalitarian roots of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government are becoming increasingly transparent through its dismissing of the central truth that builds up society: the life of every person must be safeguarded and protected...
Terezín. Auschwitz-Birkenau....
