The “beautiful violence” of Old Masters painting—a magnificence rooted in the study of Light and Dark as technique, as style, but most of all as a symbolic representation of the very essence of life on earth—remains timeless for its sublime understanding of that which for each human soul cannot be explained. “To define art is [...]
Back in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a superstition developed in the classical music world that prophesied the Ninth would be a composer’s last symphony. Arnold Schoenberg summed it up in an eloquent fashion, stating that “he who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us [...]
Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind,” as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. “Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man [...]
Let not future generations say of us: We slept. Instead, may they remember us as those who fought the good fight for the Logos and for humanity. Let it be said that in the twenty-first century we took up either of our mythically-laden swords and wielded them with all the force imaginable. My talk today [...]
Nikole Hannah-Jones is right and wrong. Although the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the year and the event carry less significance than she imagines. Although neither deceptive nor careless, she is uninterested in facts in a conventional sense. Her principal objective is not to understand the past but to rebuke the present and, [...]
When I touch my Maria Theresa thaler, I am touching history. I am uplifted by the coin to another world, which I am invited to enter. I know that my thaler participates in the legend of a grand queen who appeared in history, and it calls me to defend the Christian civilization that inspired its [...]
Russell Kirk knew that in the empire of science, if it be genuine science, one must pursue wisdom and leave space in the world for mystery and faith. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge. —Flannery O’Conner to Alfred Corn, 12 August 1962 When thoughtful conservatives commemorated the fiftieth anniversary [...]
Might the “big R” Reformation of the sixteenth century and the “big R” Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth owe something to the first great revolution that made Old Europe in the first place? It has been noted that historians are creatures professionally invested in change. We should therefore suspect them when they speak of [...]
These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment. [...]
Complex and perceptive, Willmoore Kendall's ideas remain relevant as the most important intellectual defense of the American people’s right to rule itself rather than to submit to the tyranny of experts. He is the man who engineered the foundation, structure, and superstructure of a bridge to democracy with his own formidable intellect and tremendous erudition. [...]
Stepping back out of the snapshot of 1953, I am struck by a world which bears many of the hallmarks of our own deplorable epoch. The most striking difference, and it is a grim and sobering one, is that our own techno-dominated peers seem much more comfortable with their enslavement to Big Brother than were [...]
Many so-called conservatives are buying into the progressive presumption that things are progressing inexorably in one direction, which the progressives think is a liberated future and which conservatives think is a libertine hell. Such conservatives agree with the progressive perspective; they just don’t like it! It is odd that those who consider themselves “progressives” assign [...]
Joseph T. Stuart shows us that the relationship between the Enlightenment and Christianity was not strictly one of opposition and conflict. Rather, the Enlightenment was a general program and set of ideas that influenced all sectors of life, including religion itself. Rethinking the Enlightenment: Faith in the Age of Reason, by Joseph T. Stuart (351 [...]
Russia’s leaders are flawed, inclined toward violence, and covetous of power—but this doesn’t make them much different from the leaders of every other nation-state. On March 10, 2014, American ambassadors from across the globe descended on Washington for our annual conference: a few days to forget about the day-to-day hassles of running embassies and coping [...]