Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, & the Birth of Right and Left

By |2026-02-08T17:26:22-06:00February 8th, 2026|Categories: Books, Bruce Frohnen, Edmund Burke, Featured, Timeless Essays|

Do you wish to understand the birth of right and left? Examine the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin, (304 pages, Basic Books, 2014) Those seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of contemporary [...]

Ronald Reagan & the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism

By |2026-02-05T16:08:01-06:00February 5th, 2026|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Economics, Featured, Politics, Ronald Reagan, Timeless Essays|

Ronald Reagan’s version of conservatism was far more pro-government than was Barry Goldwater’s. Compassion, not liberty, was Reagan’s guide. This raises the question: To what extent is the success of modern political conservatism dependent upon the conservation of liberal, even progressive, reforms? The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism [...]

Don Quixote and Imaginative Places

By |2026-01-15T17:30:18-06:00January 15th, 2026|Categories: E.B., Featured, Great Books, Imagination, Quotation, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The one incident in Cervantes’s huge novel that has become American folklore is Don Quixote’s adventure with the windmills. As it happens, it contains, almost incidentally, the Don’s own statement of the crux of his life, the credo that makes his world one of high adventure. He is moved by his knight errant’s sense of [...]

Gifts From We Know Not Where

By |2025-11-24T16:50:55-06:00November 24th, 2025|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Essential, Featured, Graduation, Great Books, Homer, Mystery, Odyssey, Timeless Essays|

We can encourage openness of expectation in ourselves and in one another, so that the mysterious gifts of experience, strange exhilarations and wonders, gifts from we know not where, will not be lost on us. A just expectation of life may include an expectation of moments that seem mysterious gifts from we know not where. [...]

The Map of Human Character

By |2025-11-04T20:20:06-06:00November 4th, 2025|Categories: Character, Essential, Family, Featured, History, Timeless Essays, Will Durant, Wisdom|

We of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. But how, without history, can we understand these events? “History” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” As one who has written history for twenty-five years, and studied [...]

Russell Kirk and the Haunting of Piety Hill

By |2025-10-18T21:19:04-05:00October 18th, 2025|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Featured, Fiction, Halloween, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

The curtain between the world of the living and that of the dead was for Russell Kirk truly thin, as evidenced in his scholarly work and in his fiction. A ghost, as Kirk understood it, was a soul trapped between physical and eternal existence. The curtain between the world of the living and of the [...]

Conservatism: A Lecture

By |2025-10-11T22:51:31-05:00October 11th, 2025|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Featured, Political Science Reviewer, Timeless Essays|

The modern political conflict goes much deeper than the old party struggle. It has become a battle of ideas and beliefs. Practical politics are not enough. We need a Conservative sociology to set against the Socialist theory of society, and a spiritual ideal of Conservative order to meet the idealism of revolution. Introduction and Notes by [...]

The Violent Assault Upon Virtue

By |2025-09-17T13:58:50-05:00September 17th, 2025|Categories: Culture, Featured, Imagination, Literature, Marion Montgomery, Poetry, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

When one dares to enter the country of other men’s souls in quest of understanding about the nature of virtue, he enters a dangerous world. When one dares to enter the country of other men’s souls in quest of understanding about the nature of virtue, he enters a dangerous world, especially when that world is [...]

Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Noble Spirit

By |2025-08-11T17:21:12-05:00August 11th, 2025|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Timeless Essays|

Shortly before his death, Hans Urs von Balthasar addressed the question posed by many of those disconcerted by the large number of his books: Where must one start to understand him? Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997) Hans Urs von [...]

Whatever Happened to Manhood?

By |2025-08-05T18:27:46-05:00August 5th, 2025|Categories: Books, Christianity, Faith, Family, Featured, Louis Markos, Modernity, Timeless Essays|

Wayne Braudrick spares no punches in calling men to live up to a biblical ideal: one which expects them to be focused servant leaders who are true to their word, who fight for the right, who commit themselves to life-long learning, and who form strong, lasting friendships. Whatever Happened to Manhood? A Return to Biblical [...]

Conservatism and the Life of the Spirit

By |2025-07-22T16:30:00-05:00July 22nd, 2025|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George A. Panichas, Religion, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

If we are to recover “the moral ideal” and if we are to be reconsecrated to the life of the spirit, we are in urgent need of an unconditional conservatism: lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic. [...]

The Sons of Remus & the Question of Western Identity

By |2025-07-16T15:53:55-05:00July 16th, 2025|Categories: Books, Culture, Europe, Featured, History, Rome, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Andrew C. Johnston’s “The Sons of Remus” provides a window into not only how European identities were formed, but how all societies engage in a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation in determining who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain, by [...]

Irving Babbitt: An Act of Reparation

By |2025-07-14T16:10:53-05:00July 14th, 2025|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George A. Panichas, Irving Babbitt, Leadership, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Irving Babbitt wrestled with those fundamental life questions that relate to the fate of man in the modern world. What he chose to say about this world of increasing material organization continues to make Babbitt’s work and thought disturbing and unpalatable. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) never wavered in what he viewed as being his commanding office [...]

History: The Miracles of Memory and Tradition

By |2025-06-30T21:30:39-05:00June 30th, 2025|Categories: Family, Featured, History, Quotation, Timeless Essays, Will Durant, Wisdom|

The very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure; for usually excess generates its opposite. One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline. So the moral decay of ancient [...]

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