What ideology ever threatened America more than Islamic extremism? And yet might Islam, which once helped save and preserve Western thought and culture a thousand years ago, do something similar this century, helping to bring us back to a more spiritual, less materialistic, epoch?… 1938. The world is on the threshold of the most devastating war [...]
I tried to explain to the police officer that I hadn’t said anything to him, but the uproar around us was immense, but I could see the fear and the fury in his eyes and as his club came within an inch of my face, I sensibly turned silent… Like many others, I have had [...]
To arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom… But I might perhaps make a better use of the opening you afford me if I were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of [...]
We have a choice: either to shape our lives by freedom and the desire to possess more and more material goods or to fashion our lives around duty and the goal of spiritual freedom, the release from cultural dictates and a narrow self. Maybe you are different than I am, but I drifted through life, [...]
President Xi has initiated a campaign of national renewal based on a return to China’s traditional values. But at the same time, an astonishingly large number of ordinary Chinese people are turning to Christianity. In a recent essay for the Catholic Thing, Mary Eberstadt focuses on reasons for hope and cheerfulness in the midst of America’s [...]
Since American culture tells us that all individuals are equal and that we can recognize the truth just as well as the next person, we think that we have no need to seek guidance from others, even acknowledged masters. We Americans so firmly believe that each one of us has freely chosen our own way [...]
The nation-state is a fact of life today. It is a necessary protection for people, in their communities, as they face dangers from foreign powers and state-less international elites. But we must remember that it is necessary to guard the guardian of our freedom, and to maintain our own virtue if we are to guard [...]
No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live. Having a vastly richer interior life, we humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living, and we must recognize the most fundamental principle of human life: By nature every person is meant to love and be loved. I don’t know about [...]
The cause of modern American disunity can be found in today’s twisted notions of freedom. In his masterwork, The City of God, Saint Augustine offers a definition of a people that can shed some light on why we are so fragmented today. He states that a people is “a gathered multitude of rational beings united [...]
There might be few things on which most people agree but freedom is one of them. Although we might differ over what we understand freedom to be, we all think freedom is a good thing. And yet, truth be told, most of us don’t care as much about it as we say we do or [...]
Of old sat freedom on the heights, The thunders breaking at her feet; Above her shook the starry lights; She heard the torrents meet. […]
My list of pet peeves is short, and it runs like this: traffic, small dogs, and shopping. Fate has ruled that I shall always dislike these three things, and there’s no help for it. But for now, I want to focus only on the last one. Though I’ve spent my whole life ignoring clothing stores, [...]
I have become increasingly cynical about my fellow Americans’ praise of freedom. “Freedom,” it seems to me, has become a meaningless jingoistic slogan that is used to excuse most anything. “Our boys died defending our freedom!” they cry as yet another flag-draped coffin is unloaded from the plane. Did that boy die defending our freedom? [...]
A little more than a year ago, I had the chance to talk with an extremely intelligent and talented scholar, one who had justly won a number of major awards. As we began to talk rather civilly over coffee and tea about our understandings of modern academia, this person said with some exasperation after I told [...]