The Death of Europe: Two Classic Films and the Great War

By |2019-10-15T21:57:31-05:00November 10th, 2018|Categories: Ethics, Europe, Film, Friendship, Mark Malvasi, Nationalism, Senior Contributors, War, Western Civilization, World War II|

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… The Great War was a catastrophe for Europe. The [...]

Two Kinds of Jesuits

By |2021-10-04T09:27:30-05:00November 3rd, 2018|Categories: Christianity, Culture War, Dwight Longenecker, Ethics, Faith, Religion, Senior Contributors|

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 who proclaimed, “Sanctity! It must be won at the point of a sword!”, the calendar marches [...]

The Saudi Crown Prince Starring in the Role of Henry II

By |2024-03-15T16:42:30-05:00October 21st, 2018|Categories: Ethics, Joseph Mussomeli, Journalism, Middle East, Monarchy, Politics, Tyranny|

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 morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]

Conscience in Montaigne’s “Essays” & Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”

By |2022-05-14T12:56:40-05:00August 22nd, 2018|Categories: Ethics, Evil, Mitchell Kalpakgian, Morality, William Shakespeare|

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...   In the culture of sixteenth-century Europe that witnessed revolutions in geography with [...]

The Right Idea: How West & East Seek the True, Good, & Beautiful

By |2021-04-26T14:14:57-05:00July 6th, 2018|Categories: Aristotle, Beauty, Ethics, George Stanciu, Intelligence, St. Thomas Aquinas, Truth|

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, the good, and the beautiful can be [...]

The Nietzschean Shakespeare

By |2021-04-27T21:00:31-05:00June 13th, 2018|Categories: Books, Ethics, Friedrich Nietzsche, History, Philosophy, William Shakespeare|

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… Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire by Paul A. Cantor (University of Chicago Press, 2017) [...]

Does Love Always Lead to Suffering?

By |2021-04-27T12:06:42-05:00March 21st, 2018|Categories: Aristotle, Christianity, Ethics, George Stanciu, Homer, Love, Plato, Religion, St. Augustine|

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, writes, “Sacred Scripture is a great book about suffering.”[1] He then quotes the Old Testament to illustrate the spectrum of human suffering: the [...]

The Opioid Crisis: A Spiritual Solution

By |2020-06-29T10:48:13-05:00January 17th, 2018|Categories: Civil Society, Culture, Culture War, Ethics, John Horvat, Order, Secularism|

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… An opioid crisis is devastating America. Every day, more than ninety [...]

An Oration on the Scholar’s Mission

By |2023-04-16T21:31:15-05:00January 1st, 2018|Categories: Christianity, Classics, Education, Equality, Ethics, Faith, Featured, History|

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 of a good to which art is subsidiary. [...]

René Girard and the Common Good

By |2023-11-25T12:07:02-06:00August 25th, 2017|Categories: Books, Character, Christianity, Ethics, Featured, Rene Girard, St. Thomas Aquinas|

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 claim that “the work of René Girard would not seem all that relevant to Thomists.... However, in my estimation, Girard’s thought [...]

Amos Kendall: A Great, Unremembered American

By |2020-09-14T16:07:32-05:00August 2nd, 2017|Categories: American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Ethics, Government, History, Politics, Presidency|

 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 of advisors during his presidency, none mattered as much to Andrew Jackson as Amos Kendall, a steadfast friend [...]

Trudeau’s Cognitive Dissonance: Euthanasia and the Holocaust

By |2017-07-25T00:11:28-05:00July 24th, 2017|Categories: Compassion, Culture, Death, Ethics, Politics|

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. Majdanek. Treblinka. These places of suffering, even their very names, signify what Eva Hoffman calls the “abrupt but [...]

Should We Choose the “Boromir Option”?

By |2017-07-14T15:38:19-05:00July 9th, 2017|Categories: Civilization, Ethics, Evil, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, National Security, Senior Contributors, Terrorism|

The so-called Boromir Option raises the question as to whether it is ever permissible to use evil means in pursuit of a good end… In a recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative I wrote about what I called the Mercutio Option, based on the character in Romeo & Juliet who cursed both the warring factions [...]

Bill Nye and His Marchers for Pseudo-Science

By |2017-05-14T09:23:57-05:00May 9th, 2017|Categories: Ethics, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg, Theology|

True science is a great thing, for it honors God’s gifts to us, not the least of which is the intellect. Bill Nye and the Marchers for Science, however, are not really promoting science, but a utopian political ideology… In a public spectacle reminiscent of an episode of The Twilight Zone, on this past “Earth [...]

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