“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and [...]
Michael Herr left us one of the best accounts of men at war in his book, “Dispatches.” A reporter, he had gone to Vietnam to find a story, but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life. Dispatches by Michael Herr (Knopf Doubleday, 272 pages, 1977) As the 1967 Summer [...]
Throughout the centuries Spain has done more than any nation to fight the Long Defeat and, in her heroism, has shown us many fleeting glimpses of the Final Victory. The poet Roy Campbell declared that Spain was “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul.”[i] Received into the Catholic Church in [...]
Is there room for yet another biography of Abraham Lincoln? Of course there is, especially if the biographer in question is as deft and insightful as Jon Meacham. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (676 pages, Random House, 2022) Is there room for yet another biography of Abraham [...]
Historical consciousness and the attendant self-knowledge show what man has become, what he has made of himself, not only through his deeds but also, and more importantly, through the contemplation of what he has been. Together these insights potentially constitute the foundation of a new humanism, encouraging us to turn backward and inward rather than [...]
What to do with the provocative and apparently silly question concerning Churchill’s sympathies with the Nazis? Surely it is simply absurd to associate the heroic wartime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with the Nazi regime which he did so much to defeat. There are two ways of seeing reality. We can see it with [...]
Modernity, by God’s grace, may be the site of a new synthesis, the transcending of stale categories of thought and practice, in which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity and flourishing of man. The Immanent Frame and Great [...]
Wallace Stevens’ poetry is replete with examples of this effort to understand and articulate the poet as creator of things and meaning. Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter to a friend that “[a]fter all, I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese… etc., as much as I like supreme fiction,” (Letters, 431) Despite this protest, [...]
Luther Martin understood human nature with a genius of sheer power, foresight, and brilliance. He believed that there can be no union without subsidiarity because without it, governments run with the cyclical and typical tyrannies of humankind. Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, The Life of Luther Martin, by Bill Kauffman (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008) “Happiness is [...]
The human rejection of God and man, the destruction and even the devouring of the past and future—these lead to the nihilistic dynamic that there can be no proper beginning, middle, and end of the human story. It doesn’t go anywhere or mean anything. It will simply cease when there is nothing left to eradicate. [...]
No better champion of justice, fairness, liberty, truth, and human flourishing exists than the complex and poorly known entity we call Western Civilization. The West’s weakening or demise would pose a threat to many human virtues. Recovering and extending Western principles remain our best hope for a more humane world. Where did “Western” Civilization come [...]
Biographer Troy Senik insists that though Grover Cleveland’s was not a “great presidency,” his subject is “one of our greatest presidents." And it is the fundamental soundness of Cleveland's character that goes a good deal of the way toward explaining why this might well be so. A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable [...]
Contempt of neighbour takes many forms. One such form is chronological snobbery, in which we turn up our supercilious “progressive” noses at our ancestors. The past is deemed as inferior to the present and the people of the past are ipso facto inferior to those who happen to be alive today. Contempt of neighbour takes [...]
Perhaps more than any other figure in the early history of the American Republic, John Marshall shaped the Supreme Court as well as attitudes toward and understandings of the U.S. Constitution. John Marshall (September 24, 1755–July 6, 1835) was the fourth man to serve as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, following [...]