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 [...]
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 [...]
Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little [...]
Avellina Balestri's "Saplings of Sherwood" has as its setting the area surrounding Sherwood Forest during the years when Robin Locksley and Maid Marian were children and later teenagers. This is a truly masterful piece of storytelling and as near to the real or legendary Robin Hood as any of us is likely to get. There [...]
Unsure of Indian country in the West, Joseph Smith headed back east, purchasing land on the Mississippi River, north of Quincy, Illinois, in 1839, where the Mormons did exceedingly well. By 1844, the settlement of Nauvoo had become the largest town in Illinois with more than 10,000 people. Smith was at the pinnacle of his [...]
No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell, who reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee. Helen Choate Bell In the late nineteenth century, a horse-drawn carriage carrying Oliver Wendell [...]
Mountain men carved paths into the western wilderness, forging the way for American merchants and settlers who also looked to the West for economic sustenance and personal autonomy. In popular and literary mythology, the figure of the mountain man became a symbol of the independence and power of the individual American in the West. White [...]
Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his [...]