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Rigor in Place of Rancor

In the last few years, accounts of the growing politicization of academic discourse have made their way from colleges and universities onto conversations on a public, and perhaps national, scale. What is the essence behind such rancor?... There are two ways of getting home; and one...

Deep Knowledge in a Flat World

A hero is someone you admire to the point of losing sleep over. A hero is one the ancients were tempted to worship, with the ardent hope that some of the strength from his dead body would seep into the ground and make their crops fertile. A...

Will American Caesars Arise?

The Framers had no intention of making their chief executive officer a Caesar, on the model of Augustus. Nor does any eminent politician or publicist nowadays advocate openly such concentration of power in the executive... May a...

The Problem of Language and Our Schools

The word “education” itself has become a political symbol co-opted by a secular government to mean career and college training for the sake of a mechanized society. A theoretical and conceptual recovery of the word “education” would be a return to the notion that an education is...

Generations of Leaves

Everything in nature changes—but love strives for the immortal. What keeps the form of a college supple and stable must be love for something essentially unchanging and yet eternally young, the “beauty so ancient and so new”...

Edmund Burke & the French Revolutionaries

The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke rightly understood, sought not just the overturning of the old, but, critically, they also desired the destruction of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Only by lying about the nature of the human person could they accomplish their goals...

Great Books and Small Colleges

The characteristic frame of mind befitting liberal education is reverent radicality—deep respect and penetrating questions. It is a serious mistake to present liberal education as preoccupied with “questioning,” a surreptitiously skewering aggression on the way things are... Editor’s Note: St. John’s College and Zaytuna College both describe...

Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed

Patrick Deneen’s masterful study provides a compelling, clear, and scholarly analysis that helps people understand the failure of liberalism: It has failed because it has wildly succeeded beyond all expectations... Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen (248 pages, Yale University Press, 2017)

A Fictional Path to Understanding the Mystery of Suffering

At its deepest, Glenn Arbery's Bearings and Distances asks and endeavours brilliantly to answer the most difficult of questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are the innocent corrupted?... Bearings & Distances by Glenn Arbery (346 pages, Wiseblood Books, 2015)

Surprised by Faith: My Moroccan Odyssey

There I, a convinced atheist, stood alone in a sandy and windy world, devoid of water, trees, or anything that seemed to be alive. And I couldn’t help but wonder what madness had overcome me... The most...

How to Constitute a World

Immanuel Kant is the most radical modern, the founder of our ultimate subjectivity. His three Critiques are world-constituting and world-inverting. Before him, the world qualified the mind; now consciousness constitutes the world... (This essay was originally published as the preface to How to Constitute a World...

T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy

If we take a careful look at T.S. Eliot, we shall see a born conservative, attached to certain austere traditions of previous ages, and yet one who saw clearly that those traditions had worn thin—they had grown conventional and insincere because no one had bothered to establish...

Right Reason Does Not Pay

It is not by the love of money or the love of earthly power that men and women are moved to publish a serious journal of ideas. Rather, they are animated by their love of right reason...

Intelligent Piety: The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor

Not only was Flannery O’Connor one of the most important Christian Humanists of the twentieth century, but she also well understood what made Christian Humanism what it was. While it might very well be conservative, it was always imaginative, allowing one to imagine what must be conserved...