Back in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s an evil regime, inspired by the relativist ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, sought to breed a master race, practicing eugenics to eliminate those it considered subhuman (untermenschen), including the weak and the disabled. Today, many countries have resurrected the dark days of the past, using eugenics [...]
In Othello, William Shakespeare, the philosopher of everyday life, holds up a mirror to us and shows us what human beings are capable of. Beneath our most pleasantly cultivated exterior, there often lurks a serpent… William Hazlitt is widely recognized as one of the greatest of Shakespearean critics. Yes, there is Dr. Johnson; yes, there [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]