The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen”

By |2024-02-12T19:27:56-06:00February 12th, 2024|Categories: Love, Marriage, Music, Paul Krause, Richard Wagner, Timeless Essays|

Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]

The Heroism of Civilization

By |2023-12-03T18:47:28-06:00December 3rd, 2023|Categories: Civilization, David Deavel, Family, Heroism, Marriage, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

What we need in American society are more imaginative resources for thinking about marriage and the great slog of parenthood. We need stories, plays, movies, and shows about the sort of heroism that requires long-haul fortitude and not just courage in the moment. A long-held but somewhat flexible fantasy I have engaged in periodically since [...]

The Masculine Genius: Hierarchal, Sacrificial Responsibility

By |2023-07-06T19:30:43-05:00July 6th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christianity, Marriage|

Devin Schadt's "The Meaning and Mystery of Man" is an essential and enjoyable read for any husband or any man considering marriage, who wants to understand how wives are “essential in helping us become heroic, valiant, sacrificial men of God, and how a husband’s headship is at the service of completing his bride." The Meaning [...]

The Greatest Friendship

By |2023-02-16T15:06:51-06:00February 16th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Friendship, Marriage|

Marriage entails a total gift of oneself to another. This gift then forms the basis for what is truly the greatest human friendship possible, and, in turn, even comes to signify in a mysterious way that highest of all loves, the divine love shared between Christ and his Church. “Love desires immortality… mortal nature seeks [...]

Husbands and Wives in Homer

By |2023-01-15T11:42:22-06:00January 15th, 2023|Categories: Great Books, Homer, Iliad, Literature, Louis Markos, Marriage, Odyssey, Western Civilization|

How do I know that there were dead white males who loved and respected their wives? Because the twin literary fountainheads of Western literature each highlights a mature and faithful couple who share mutual affection and regard for one another: Hector and Andromache in the "Iliad"; Odysseus and Penelope in the "Odyssey." As a Texan [...]

Marriage & Manliness in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”

By |2022-12-13T14:27:19-06:00December 12th, 2022|Categories: Leo Tolstoy, Literature, Marriage|

Marriage for Tolstoy’s heroic men is not the be-all and end-all of a life well lived. Romantic love compromises marriage, to the detriment of both women and men. The well-married are good at the prosaic love of family life, not just falling in love. They find romance and fulfillment in joyfully executing the necessities of [...]

“The Crown”: A Portrait of a Fractured Family

By |2022-11-18T08:19:57-06:00November 17th, 2022|Categories: England, Marriage, Monarchy, Television, Western Civilization|

The strongest point of Netflix's series "The Crown" is that it shows the moral decline of Britain and the West through the moral decline of one British family. As such, it is a sad and searing witness to the same state of fractured families and mutilated marriages we face across the waning West. Having completed [...]

“Radical Marriage” & the Modern Heresies of Love

By |2022-09-21T16:56:48-05:00September 21st, 2022|Categories: Feminism, Literature, Love, Marriage, Mitchell Kalpakgian, Timeless Essays|

In “The Awakening of Miss Prim,” the title character’s awakening and education in the most natural ways of friendship illuminate for her the great wisdom and tradition of marriage, which modern education and ideology in their blatant ignorance have relegated to the past as a useless, unnecessary institution. In Natalie Fenollera Sanmartin’s bestseller The Awakening of [...]

On Being Conservative

By |2022-08-23T14:48:35-05:00August 23rd, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Family, Jane Austen, Marriage, Philosophy, Robert Nisbet, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region. Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades, one of the most compelling is Robert Nisbet’s: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection [...]

Marriage and Reading as Elite Customs

By |2022-07-21T22:29:47-05:00May 28th, 2022|Categories: Education, Liberal Learning, Marriage, Peter A. Lawler|

It has been through books that Americans have been infused with what loosely can be called a “common culture,” a common way of experiencing our world and our place in it. We can at least say that one sign of personal impoverishment is the inability to experience the emotional elevation that comes through reading “real [...]

Jane Austen’s Vision of a Happy Marriage

By |2021-03-23T16:06:40-05:00March 23rd, 2021|Categories: Literature, Marriage|

Teaching Jane Austen to high school homeschoolers is a delightful and enlivening experience. In addition to eagerness and enthusiasm, the students bring hearts relatively free of suspicion and agendas. They do not come determined to read post-Christian sensibilities into emphatically Christian texts. I do find, however, that some time must be devoted to negotiating deeply-infused [...]

“Persuasion’s” Principles for Popping the Question

By |2023-07-18T00:15:06-05:00December 1st, 2020|Categories: David Deavel, Great Books, Jane Austen, Marriage, Morality, Senior Contributors|

Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” is the story of Anne Elliott, who has broken one engagement, rejected another, and is still single and pining after the man whom she would have married. Austen brings the theme of right marriage to perfection here: Nobility of heart and mind is more important than nobility of title and excess of [...]

“A Single Life”

By |2020-10-23T13:38:24-05:00October 22nd, 2020|Categories: Books, Fiction, Love, Marriage, Religion|

Though written before COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the agitated lead-up to the 2020 election, Daniel Goodman’s novel, “A Single Life,” resonates with the pain of increased isolation, racial tension, and alienation as Eli Newman treads the arduous road to romance and struggles with his observant Jewish life. A Single Life, by Daniel [...]

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