I became a Catholic—after seven years of teenage atheism—because of the lyrics of the album, "The Colour of Spring," by the English band Talk Talk. I didn’t know Mark Hollis, the writer of those lyrics, and I don’t claim that he actually practiced what he preached. But preached he did! First, I should really cool [...]
Although he wrote a Requiem Mass, Te Deum, and other spiritual compositions, the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz has regularly received brickbats from Catholic listeners. In The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), the Dutch-American organist and choirmaster Joseph Otten decried the Berlioz Requiem as a “sacred work, but it does not express any deep personal faith from Berlioz himself... [...]
What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]
UFOs are supposed to be the stuff of conspiracy theories and fringe documentaries. And yet many high-ranking government officials believe some of the most explosive claims about UFOs to be true. How would this potential reality affect the conservative worldview? On December 13, 2023 Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor to deliver [...]
Arguably one of the finest stories in the Western Tradition, “Beowulf” concerns the advent of a hero and his timely end. Throughout, questions of fate, free will, good, and evil predominate. Most prominent, though, are the theological questions of will and grace, one pagan and the other Christian. In 1926, when merely a thirty-four year [...]
There is dignity and value in work. You who live in America once knew this. You did not think lesser of a man because he got his hands dirty with honest toil. To the contrary, you thought it a grand thing to build and to create. But all that has changed. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]
It is in the products of great art that we encounter our condition as human beings as metaxic: in between. We come from non-existence and journey to our departure from this existence; the “middle” can seem to be all there is whilst we are in the midst of things. Yet we possess that constant eagerness [...]
Throughout his works, Irving Babbitt addressed the continuing decline of the humanistic imagination, humanism constituting a tradition that had produced a leadership class of ladies and gentlemen. His educational theory was aimed at producing an elite, humanistic aristocracy that would lead responsibly and ethically. When Literature and the American College, Irving Babbitt’s critique of the [...]
Tolkien succeeds in portraying the goodness of the Shire, of Rivendell, of Gondor, of Rohan in compelling, tangible ways. The most remarkable aspect of Tolkien’s vision is his ability to make the good desirable. Near the end of The Return of the King movie, while Frodo and Sam are making the arduous climb up Mount [...]
Though I celebrate courage in my "Iliad" and perseverance in my "Odyssey," there is a third, greater virtue, apart from which civilization can neither thrive nor survive. I speak of xenia, a word that your age would translate as hospitality, but which means far more, having to do with the relationship between a stronger and [...]
Emily Dickinson creates a simple buffet for our imagination in her nature and summer poems, but most especially in "I taste a liquor never brewed." And rather than being appalled by her celebration of “drunkenness,” I embrace her abandoned delight in the essence of summer. I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped [...]
Both free thinking and innovation depend on having the imagination to see alternate ways of being, to envision worlds that we do not yet see before us, to reconsider what is there, and to conceive what could be there in its place. As the president of an American college with a distinctive approach to liberal [...]
Justice is that which breaks us out of the cycle of vengeance. It achieves a higher vision that considers motives (and not just actions), causes (and not just effects), purposes (and not just naked facts). The triumph of justice does not signify the total defeat of vengeance, but its transformation into something beneficent. Author’s Introduction: [...]
William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, died April 23, 1616) is arguably the greatest writer in any language. Shakespeare’s classical poetry is not only one of the most exalted examples of what an immortal sense of creative identity can accomplish, it is a symbol of the artist’s immortality, and timelessness itself. As today’s coronavirus crisis [...]