Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise? I. Continuing for more than 200 years, from approximately 27 B.C. to A.D. 180, the Pax Romana was among the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in history—certainly in the history of [...]
If for nothing else, Christopher Columbus should be remembered for his desire to explore and expand the realm of Western civilization. We might very well agree or disagree with his motives, but we would be fools to ignore Columbus' importance as a figure in history. Amazingly enough, thanks to my very few essays at The [...]
Saint Francis of Assisi took no created thing for granted, finding them all reflections of God and reasons to praise Him. For Francis, even the birds themselves praised God by their singing—an action we perform consciously with the assent of our reason and will. Some of the earliest literature in the Italian language owes its [...]
We live in a broken world; we live in a broken time. But we should resolve that these dead did not die in vain. Good can be brought forth from evil. We believe this because it is part of our continuing duty and responsibility to those who died. And there is no better way to [...]
The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]
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 [...]