Shakespeare's age was one in which sin was put at the service of secular tyranny and in which those who sought to practice the fullness of the Faith were held in scorn and punished by the enforcement of draconian laws. It was an age in which the battle for religious liberty was a matter of [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]
The baptism or sanctification of the pagan reflects the baptism and sanctification of the self. Like the former pagan sites, the Christian person too goes through a process of being lost, baptized, and sanctified. St. Paul, at Mars’ Hill, had helped break the Heraclitian, Platonic, and Stoic cycles of the classical world, by sanctifying the [...]
World War One shattered the old political order, its traditional monarchies and aristocracies, and the historical boundaries of nations. The explosion also ejected the population of European nations across the world in a flood of refugees, both the high born and the low. Hundreds of thousands fled before invading armies in Belgium, Russia, Italy, Austria, [...]
From the Roman Catholic perspective, the Logos is the beginning, the middle, and the end of time and history, and history itself is a reflection of the Logos. Each person—from Adam to the last person—is a finite reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Image of God, an incarnate soul. In the stunningly poetic [...]
The Nazi Empire fell. The Soviet Empire fell. And now a new globalist empire is in the ascendant. It will also have its day, its pride preceding its own fall, but who knows how much damage will be done before it comes crashing down? In my recent essay for the Imaginative Conservative, “Bad Ideas Have [...]
Despite the immense, hydra-headed problems that have arisen over the last 500 years of the West and of the World, the Church’s mission has never wavered, whatever its obstacles, internal and external. As since the beginning of its existence, it must leaven the good, promote the true, and, through subcreation, engage the beautiful. Through the [...]
As we think about the problems of modernity, let us recognize what the great mid-20th-century artists and thinkers achieved and immerse ourselves in their works. While it is a good thing to react against modern times with the conscience of a conservative, let us do so fully aware of our roots in this most modern [...]
The Enlightenment's misreading of man and history has led to a reductionist understanding of human society. This, in turn, has led to the reduction of the human person to that of being a mere subject, or dare we say, guinea pig. The consequences of such a bad idea are clear enough. It leads and has [...]
One of the perennial problems in nineteenth-century American history was the so-called “Indian Problem.” And, a problem it was. American whites either idealized or demonized the Indians, usually depending on how far one lived from native tribes. The natives—understandably—did everything possible to protect their own hearth and homes, and many American reluctantly respected them for [...]
Father Thomas Shelley's avuncular presence, his inquiring mind, and his priestly solicitude for me and for so many around me was a potent witness of the goodness of old Catholic New York. Though he always wore clerical clothing in professional situations, there was never anything “clerical” about him, if understood as a sense of superiority [...]
God is a person, not just an idea. When he raises up saints, he does so not to have an ideologue to debate the doubters, but in order to have someone to carry on the work of Christ, who not only preached, but was a living example of what he preached. God raised up Saint [...]
There is only one standard by which any epoch can be fairly judged: In view of its own peculiar circumstances, to what extent did it allow for the development of human dignity? The medieval achievement was so magnificent that it stands with the loftiest moments of human history. The most complete ordering of medieval life [...]
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and brother of the warrior Tecumseh, was an alcoholic and a failure prior to a profound religious experience in the spring of 1805. The Creator, he claimed, commanded him to preach to all Indians, regardless of tribe. They were to abandon white ways and re-adopt traditional native practices. Under the direction [...]