Notre Dame nearly burned to the ground, from neglect, and we can say the same thing about the Church in France, in Europe, and in the West as a whole. So, we can say the same thing about our culture. On Monday, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire and nearly burned to the [...]
William Warburton was a man who, as a theologian living through the debates of the Enlightenment, readapted his role while staying true to its intentions. His was a distinctive voice in these debates because he attacked all sides equally, seeing a paradox between human thought and history. Part of the purpose of intellectual history [...]
Viktor Orbán’s notoriety ultimately has little to do with his arcane transgressions against what Western Europe’s rulers consider good government. It exists because he addresses, in language stunningly clear for a politician, the key civilizational questions facing Europe, those that richer countries are loathe to hear. A specter is haunting the European Union—the specter of [...]
I had always thought it nonsense to believe in love at first sight. But that sophomoric conceit sank with that setting sun over the Venetian church spires that summer day in 1973. And with it was washed away that companion conceit that falling in love was something that could only happen between two humans… The [...]
The Great War, in Woodrow Wilson’s view, had to become precisely what the delegates to the Congress of Vienna feared: a moral crusade, an instrument of social and political revolution… For American president Woodrow Wilson, the First World War was the “war to end all wars” by making “the world safe for democracy,” not [...]
Viktor Orbán discovered his roots in a tradition devoted to family, country and Christian values. Though he submits to democratic elections and legal restraints on his power, in order for his right-wing populism to survive he must exercise greater authority than is his by law... On June 16, 1989, 200,000 Hungarians filled Heroes’ Square in [...]
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. [...]
Hordes of people are descending on Europe, destroying local cultures and straining infrastructure. They are descending upon picturesque villages and public squares. Locals are moving out. Some might think that this invasion refers to the immigration crisis. However, these new invaders do not stay. Unlike conquering Caesar, they come, they see, and they leave. They [...]
Why doesn’t the United States do what Europe does when it comes to students and college? Why isn’t a college education free? Fall is here. That means many things are on their way down, including bank accounts as parents write tuition checks. Is anything going up? Maybe interest in “free” college. How often are we [...]
The world has been and will continue to be overwhelmingly traditionally religious, whatever intellectuals like Nietzsche might have expected to the contrary, thus confirming those philosophers who contend that all civilizations must be supported by such moral frameworks… San Diego State University recently announced what it called perhaps the largest ever study of American [...]
But all is not well between the nation state and empire: centre and periphery have their rules which at times collide, as witnessed of late. Are there any possible guiding principles that could minimize the force of collision?… In 1887 the optometrist Ludwik Zamenhof published the fruits of his passion for constructing an artificial [...]
Leon Battista Alberti’s work remains a guidebook for those who value the traditions of both classical and post-Renaissance European architecture. To read Alberti today is to discover an essential link in that long and living tradition… Like a signal from the past, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria—On the Art of Building, completed in [...]
President Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue—the Third World invasion of the West—he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future... “It is cruel. It is immoral. And it [...]
Many Hungarians clearly perceive their way of life and their country as under threat and sense that influential individuals like George Soros would like them fundamentally transformed. This is a fight between nationalists and anti-nationalists… The victory of Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz in the Hungarian elections last month elicited the predictable flurry [...]