The erosion of history is the first necessary step to the left’s transformation of the foundations of culture and society—a transformation that sees an ahistorical all-powerful government replacing all other traditional civic institutions. A recent report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed a dramatic fall in history test scores among eighth graders. Given [...]
Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, [...]
We did not discard most of the image of reality from the Middle Ages. The lovely whole image was smashed like stained glass under the hammer of zealots, but later people recovered fragments and used them to create the world in which we live. C.S. Lewis wrote a book of profound scholarship, The Discarded Image, [...]
The Medieval Church culturally unified Christendom through a common language, Latin, and a common liturgy, tying men together with other men of their own time, but also with the whole communion of saints. Petrarch, ca. 1350, first employed the term “Medieval” to argue that his time (ca. 1350) had advanced beyond the so-called “dark ages.” [...]
Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]
Seashore towns once played the same conservative role as American farms did, but by the end of the twentieth century, man took to coercing nature in order to protect his ocean playground. The Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States serve as a home to the Union’s great cities and to a majority of [...]
Historical awareness can deliver us from both crushing despair and sophomoric narcissism just by placing our own situation in the context of broader human experience. Scholar Allan Bloom famously wrote, “Failure to read good books… strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that here and now is all there is.”[1] “Our most fatal tendency”... given the [...]
The indomitable Jane Austen has no love for “Bloody” Mary, but it’s intriguing and amusing that she sees her in the light, or should we say the shadow, of “Bloody” Bess, who would be her successor. There is no denying Jane Austen’s status as one of the greatest novelists of all time. Her works are [...]
“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 [...]