Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s romantic conservatism is passionate, incisive, and high-minded. His notion of the “Idea” is persuasive in regard to how it exists in human society, and he lit the way to resolving the ever-present conservative tension between theory and practice. The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if tumultuous and at times disastrous, was a [...]
Fr. Philip Caraman not only epitomized the best of the Jesuit tradition in England, but he also chronicled the legacy of his heroic forebears: the Jesuit missionaries and martyrs of Tudor England as well as the courageous counter-Reformation apostles to the Americas, India, China, and beyond. Philip Caraman Rex Mottram—the Canadian dolt who [...]
The curtain between the world of the living and that of the dead was for Russell Kirk truly thin, as evidenced in his scholarly work and in his fiction. A ghost, as Kirk understood it, was a soul trapped between physical and eternal existence. The curtain between the world of the living and of the [...]
In his upcoming book, "Futuristic," Mark Voger explores what might have been had the 1950s and 1960s shaped the aesthetic of space flight and the space age. The book, simply put, is “retro”: a nostalgic celebrations of the Space Age and all its hope and optimism for a better and more humane world. Marvel’s most [...]
It is precisely because of our weakness that we need friends who will not encourage us in our folly but will have the courage to correct us. Love necessitates saying no to sin. We need friends who will not turn a blind eye to our blamefulness. True friends are not timid. They are not tame. [...]
Thomas Honegger Born in Zürich (Switzerland) in 1965, Dr. Thomas Honegger is a specialist in Medieval Germanic languages and a noted Tolkien scholar. After completing all levels of academic training at the University of Zürich, where in 1996 he earned his doctorate with a thesis entitled Animals in Medieval English Literature, he worked [...]
"The Blithedale Romance" conveys Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection. I. Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance offers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most trenchant criticism of America.[i] Unlike his more optimistic contemporaries who imagined the advance toward individual and social perfection in the United States, Hawthorne [...]
White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost [...]
In a very short novel, Allen Mendenhall manages to combine a great deal of philosophical and quasi-theological reflection, Twain-like adolescent comedy, and Faulkner-like familial dysfunction, adding to the Southern literary tradition’s collection of tales filled with absurdity, hilarity, shattering revelation, and haunting desire, all mixed to disturb and delight. A Glooming Peace This Morning by [...]
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
What is the good of seeing a terrible state of soul displayed onstage, disclosed in all its humiliation and rage? After my first morning of classes at Wyoming Catholic College on August 27, I returned to the office to find the news of the shootings at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis all over the internet. [...]
The ultimate purpose of virtue is to make us capable of friendship, of sacrificing our own good for the good of another, thus nurturing that mutual happiness and trust with another self. We know good families, totally devoted to their children, who’ve been blind-sided by woke “identity politics,” confusing and hijacking their kids. In three [...]
In the forties and fifties, Cleanth Brooks devoted himself to interpreting and popularizing the work of one of America’s greatest but most difficult novelists, his fellow Southerner William Faulkner. When I think of the state of literary criticism in the academy today, I think of a New Yorker cartoon someone has put up in the [...]
Both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, and they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish. The 1930s were a period of intellectual and cultural ferment that have much to tell us about [...]