The Heroism of Civilization

By |2023-12-03T18:47:28-06:00December 3rd, 2023|Categories: Civilization, David Deavel, Family, Heroism, Marriage, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

What we need in American society are more imaginative resources for thinking about marriage and the great slog of parenthood. We need stories, plays, movies, and shows about the sort of heroism that requires long-haul fortitude and not just courage in the moment. A long-held but somewhat flexible fantasy I have engaged in periodically since [...]

What Is Wisdom?

By |2023-11-09T19:29:39-06:00November 6th, 2023|Categories: Essential, Family, Featured, Timeless Essays, Will Durant, Wisdom|

    To the philosopher, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. — Emerson      What is wisdom? I feel like a droplet of spray which proudly poised for a moment on the crest of a wave, undertakes to analyze the sea. Ideally, wisdom is total [...]

Wilhelm Röpke’s Magnetism of the Garden

By |2023-08-29T19:38:17-05:00August 29th, 2023|Categories: Economics, Family, Political Economy, Timeless Essays, Wilhelm Roepke|

Wilhelm Röpke grew mesmerized by population growth projections which counted 300 billion inhabitants on the Earth by the year 2300. In such an anthill existence, he asked, what would happen to those “unbought graces of life”: “nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure.” Wilhelm Röpke was an [...]

Eating Alone: Aristotle & the Culture of the Meal

By |2023-02-26T17:46:43-06:00February 26th, 2023|Categories: Aristotle, Christian Living, Civilization, Family, Friendship, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]

The Family & the Orchard: The Story of Civilization in the “Odyssey”

By |2023-08-10T14:37:19-05:00September 13th, 2022|Categories: Family, Homer, Love, Mitchell Kalpakgian, Odyssey, Timeless Essays|

The planting of trees in the orchard—the passing down of tradition, of the moral wisdom of the past, of the torch of life, and of the beauty of life’s simplest but richest and pleasures—produces the great harvest of joy that culminates in the final chapters of the "Odyssey." Editor’s Note: This is the final essay [...]

Don’t Talk to Your Children

By |2022-08-29T10:22:13-05:00August 29th, 2022|Categories: Civil Society, Education, Family, Truth|

Our kids don’t need arguments, they need a childhood. They need to have their healthy imaginations nourished and their innate prejudices in favor of truth, beauty, and goodness affirmed. It’s hard to be a kid these days. Your blue-haired teachers appear on Libs of Tik-Tok videos bragging about selling you into sex slavery, and people [...]

On Being Conservative

By |2022-08-23T14:48:35-05:00August 23rd, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Family, Jane Austen, Marriage, Philosophy, Robert Nisbet, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region. Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades, one of the most compelling is Robert Nisbet’s: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection [...]

Don’t Wait for the Teachers

By |2022-08-29T10:17:50-05:00August 20th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Classical Education, Family, Western Tradition|

Ultimately, the two catecheses—of our Faith and our civilization—should go hand-in-hand. That’s the way it’s always been: the West informed our Faith, and our Faith has indelibly formed the West. If we want both to survive, and perhaps flourish in America, our children will need the intellectual and cultural tools and imagination that a true [...]

“Endgame”: Teaching the Way of the Family

By |2022-06-20T17:19:52-05:00June 20th, 2022|Categories: Books, Christianity, Culture War, David Deavel, Family, Senior Contributors|

Every bishop, priest, and pastor should read "Endgame" for the sake of the Church and the country. Much evangelization assumes things taught in families that don’t exist. This book shows the way to family—and renewed faith. Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America, by John Van Epp and J. P. [...]

Want to Stop Mass Shootings? Bring Back the Father!

By |2022-06-18T15:32:36-05:00June 18th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Community, Family, John Horvat|

In almost every single shooter case, a true Christian father is missing. By his example and counsel, the Christian father directs the boy to channel his energies and emotions into manly pursuits and virtuous action. Indeed, the devoted father provides society with a balanced young man who will defend society from attacks. Across the country, [...]

Andrew Lytle and the Order of the Family

By |2022-02-07T15:58:47-06:00November 14th, 2021|Categories: Agrarianism, Andrew Lytle, Family, History, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors, South, Southern Agrarians|

Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]

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