What do the films of Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take it With You, Lady for a Day, Lost Horizon, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, etc.), the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music, The King and I, Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, [...]
The books we read this past year in the high-school class I dubbed “Evil 12” so accurately portray evil—whether horrific and nightmarish or subtle and uncanny—that they lead the reader to recognize and love goodness all the more. Indeed, each conveys the depths of both evil and goodness in imitation of the Gospel. This past [...]
Christian schools must not follow their secular counterparts in their educational approach. They must surround their students with the noble, the beautiful, and the true in all areas of the curriculum and the academic environment, encouraging them to become like what they see. In the cultural wasteland of the ’70s, where peace and love had [...]
In reflecting the strangeness of reality and the diabolical darkness of evil, Tim Powers’ "The Mills of the Gods" takes its place alongside other cautionary tales of fictional supernatural realism that prefigure and reflect reality. They show real-life figures in the light of the truth that exposes and vanquishes the diabolical darkness. Not facts first; [...]
Now we’ve always been a happiness oriented culture. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and so forth. Right? But it’s taken a particularly interesting turn: the topic of “meaning” and “meaning in life” is coming to the fore. People, more and more, are talking about not just sheer contentedness, but what it is for [...]
In the modern world, love is often ignored or perverted into lust. When we talk of governance, when we talk of relationships, when we talk of societal structures, we never mention love. What happened? How could the modern West be so very different from the ancient and medieval West? One of my greatest joys in [...]
It makes no sense to reward someone who frustrates the purposes of literature with a major prize. Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai. There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out [...]
Was the immense popularity of the 1960s television series "Dark Shadows" some sort of cry for help during a decade of brutish violence and social sickness? After all, its central character Barnabas Collins was a vampire with moral compunction. I recently finished watching all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the campy gothic soap opera that [...]
The ultimate job of the teacher is to help orient students to and deepen their intimacy with reality itself. And the indispensable condition for a teacher being able to do this is not expertise, experience, knowledge, or pedagogical technique, however important these are, but literally being in love with the good. How do we enable [...]
What is it that makes life worth living when the temporal aspects of life are taken care of? That is the realm of culture and the spirit. It has to do with the development of our minds, our moral growth, and our sense of belonging to a community. “The empires of the future are the [...]
The way of humility leads, via the rolling road of wonder, to the heaven-haven of the reward. The way of pride leads, via the thorny path of prejudice, to a hell of one’s own devising. “For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!” In Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the [...]
The American people have endured a dark age. But today they are choosing courage over comfort. Order over anarchy. Truth over technocracy. And in doing so, they are giving birth to a new moment: A chance to rebuild a republic where men are strong, women are cherished, children are protected, and God is honored. We [...]
Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech [...]