Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” provides invaluable insight into 19th-century Italian history while creating a compelling story, allowing readers to relive an unfamiliar age of revolution and a fading nobility. Time under quarantine has been an excuse to revisit a personal favorite book and to explore its history, controversy, and literary value. I can think [...]
The Ancient Serpent had oft-times crawled into the sacred precincts of Holy Church since his first entry. However, this time his havoc would strike a thousand blows to the Mystical Body of Christ. St. Pope Pius X named the serpent: Modernism. At the beginning of time a snake slithered into a Garden called Eden. He entered [...]
Few remember Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson, who is neither lionized by the poets nor canonized by the Church. Yet he was a warrior king who is perhaps equal in greatness to Alfred and possibly rivals Edmund and Edward in piety. See you the windy levels spread About the gates of Rye? O that was where the [...]
With eyes wide open to the degradation we see all around us, we know that things are rotten in the modern world. Who can deny it? And yet there are more Christians in the world today than there have ever been in the past. The Church is not dead. Christendom has had a series of [...]
Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older [...]
The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future. It is hope. I went for a long walk in Oxford the other night. The city, of course, is always enchanting, but in early summer and at night, it is so the most. When summer [...]
Land acknowledgement statements lack factual support: What was the historical nature of the “atrocity” mentioned in the statements? By what “violent and coercive means” was the land stolen? Morally charged language requires painstaking factual research and justification. We are all familiar with the ubiquitous land acknowledgement statement that has become a common feature of political [...]
Many classical music purists today consider Sergei Rachmaninoff’s music to be excessively sentimental, admittedly lush but too similar-sounding once you’ve heard one concerto. But is this a fair assessment? Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op 18 is the kind of music that grips you by the collar and draws you into its world instantly, [...]
On the (Proposed) Sinking of America’s Great Flagship It wasn’t supposed to end this way for America’s flagship, the SS United States: the ship bestowed with the honor of bearing the namesake of her nation; she is, perhaps, the greatest merchant ship to ever be constructed by, and operated under, the American flag. If you [...]
The most important element in European foreign relations throughout the 1920s and during the early 1930s was the desire at all costs to avoid another war. There was among European statesmen a widespread conviction that another war would be infinitely more destructive than the Great War had been, and any alternative seemed preferable. 1. Hitler's [...]
The labors of Saint Patrick are among the greatest of those who have traveled far and wide for the discipleship of Christ. Although it is undoubtedly true that each and every one of the Church’s saints display a faith and virtue which is for all the ages of the world, I would especially believe that [...]
Evangeline is the spirit of those millions of people in multifarious cultures who have been expelled from their homes through ethnic cleansing or other acts of tyranny. She is the spirit of hope that endures and is patient. She haunts those who believe in ghosts. I believe in ghosts. It’s not that I have any [...]
One looks forward to the completion of Pat Buchanan's memoirs, especially the insider tales of the Nixon and Reagan years. He has always been courageous and compelling in debate and unflappable in his commitment to conservative populist principles. He, perhaps more than any public figure, waged the culture wars with grit, determination, and eloquence. Patrick [...]
The story of the Indian Wars for the American West in Peter Cozzens’s “The Earth Is Weeping” contains the tragic patterns of all human history. This history, like all real history, lives once we awaken memory and see the real contours of what lies before us. One of the compensations for long hours in the [...]