Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus

By |2024-03-17T08:59:03-05:00March 16th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Culture, History, Religion, Saint Patrick, Theology, Timeless Essays|

With my own hand I have written and put together these words to be given and handed on and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the [...]

Brutus: An Honorable Hero?

By |2024-03-14T15:33:19-05:00March 14th, 2024|Categories: Character, Herman Melville, History, Literature, Timeless Essays, Virtue, William Shakespeare|

In his last moments, Brutus voiced a sentiment about the ultimate tragedy of the virtuous life in those evil days, in which the good was punished and the evil rewarded. This does not make virtue worthless for the individual; it just may place him on the losing side. [E]veryone knows that some young bucks among [...]

American History on the Banks of the Potomac

By |2024-03-13T16:45:58-05:00March 13th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, History, Timeless Essays|

Across the mighty Potomac sits the capital of our once noble and humane republic, founded upon the idea that all men are created equal, endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What do the women and men who occupy the innumerable office buildings on either of the Potomac think about [...]

Christopher Dawson’s “Beyond Politics”

By |2024-03-10T18:20:24-05:00March 9th, 2024|Categories: Books, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, History|

“Old books” speak to the times, often in more profound ways than “new books.” Christopher Dawson's "Beyond Politics" is just such a book. It diagnosed in 1939 the cultural situation in which the book appeared, and its diagnosis is apropos to the cultural situation today. Here’s the front story followed by the more important back [...]

The Articles of Confederation and State Sovereignty

By |2024-03-01T05:39:55-06:00February 29th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Founding Document, History, Nationalism, Timeless Essays|

Article II of the Articles of Confederation codified that one of the purposes of the American Revolution was the protection of state sovereignty, by making state sovereignty a fundamental aspect of the American constitutional order. The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765-1800 by N. Coleman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016) The [...]

Surveying the Landscape of History

By |2024-02-29T05:38:53-06:00February 28th, 2024|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, History, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors|

Those who are blinded by materialism cannot see the landscape of history. They see systems instead of people, and empowerment instead of virtue. They can’t see the beautiful because they refuse to raise their eyes to heaven. The past is present whether we like it or not or know it or not. The past is [...]

Religion & Celebrity: The Search for Meaning in the 1920s

By |2024-02-18T16:12:15-06:00February 18th, 2024|Categories: History, Religion, Science|

By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]

Thomas More on Conscience, Courage, & the Comedy of Politics

By |2024-02-06T18:00:46-06:00February 6th, 2024|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Civil Society, England, History, Natural Law, Philosophy, Politics, St. Thomas More, Timeless Essays, Wisdom|

As the gulf between classical and postmodern notions of conscience and government grows ever wider and their clashes more explosive, it is high time for the jury to give renewed attention to the nuances of Thomas More’s understanding of the apparently competing, but ultimately harmonious, demands of divine, natural, and human law. In August of [...]

The Truth About Ronald Reagan

By |2024-02-05T18:33:55-06:00February 5th, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, History, Ronald Reagan, Timeless Essays|

Nearly three decades after the Reagan administration ended, several views of the fortieth president—all conflicting—have taken hold in the American popular mind. One is that Reagan was an “amiable dunce,” who was “sleepwalking through history.” Luck and circumstances made him a successful president, but he should be remembered today only as an oaf, simply being in [...]

Russell Kirk: Christian Humanism and Conservatism

By |2024-02-04T17:11:36-06:00February 4th, 2024|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Conservatism, G.K. Chesterton, History, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

Russell Kirk was aware that others had also claimed the mantle of humanism, but in the name of secularism. The revival of Christian humanism in our time is spurred by the need to respond to the rise of this popular secular humanism and its half-truths. During a dinner conversation with Russell and Annette Kirk in [...]

James Otis, Then and Now

By |2024-02-05T18:35:10-06:00February 4th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, History, Politics, Rights, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Going back to the first principles of the Founding, one finds that the Founders talked unceasingly about rights. Rights language became a critical part of the cultural landscape when James Otis delivered his oration on the nature of rights, the common law, and the natural law. Feel free to call me a conservative (I won’t [...]

“Napoleon,” the Movie: A Reflection

By |2024-01-29T19:22:35-06:00January 29th, 2024|Categories: Film, History, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors|

Ridley Scott’s film is a vast oversimplification of a complex historical reality. Therein lies the danger. Like a mind-altering drug, the film provides a convenient shortcut that saves the audience the time and trouble of thinking for themselves. Filmgoers, of course, need not become experts in Napoleonic history. But Scott might have done more to [...]

Chasing Lions: Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful

By |2024-01-15T18:05:45-06:00January 15th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Featured, Great Books, History, Literature, Love, Timeless Essays, Truth|

When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]

History on Proper Principles: The Legacy of Forrest McDonald

By |2024-01-07T09:40:44-06:00January 6th, 2024|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Federalist Papers, Forrest McDonald, History, Literature, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates what he has found in an understandable and [...]

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