The great Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This is so wonderfully true that, if we have eyes opened in humility, we can see God’s grandeur shining forth in all that is truly beautiful in Creation. We see it in the multifarious shades of [...]
Solitude takes us out to deep and spacious waters where we see that silence is one of our greatest gifts and blessings, in which we discover not only ourselves but God as well. It’s striking the number of books coming out recently on the subject of silence; it must be a felt need in our [...]
“Should not the unswerving modernists… come to the realization that there is nothing more wearisome or more barren than the most antiquated of all manias: the rage to be modern?” Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) In my visits to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I generally sidestep the East Building, the portion devoted to modern [...]
Most in the media disdain the common man, so Americans are right to be distrustful of journalists. But should this lead Americans to abandoning the function that the media plays in society? Americans are growing more distrustful of the media and college universities. And they’re perfectly right to be. It is not that everyone in [...]
Advocates of the liberal arts include “heretical” books in the great conversation, whereas political liberals seek to silence them as dangerous. As we have seen in Nazi Germany and in communist countries, the banning of “heretical” books ends with the burning of “heretics.” Several years ago, I visited the two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, in [...]
The sirens tempted unwary sailors towards the rocks with their enchanting song and alluring loveliness. They often stand for the lusts of the flesh, but their destructive allure perhaps more powerfully stands for the seductive enchantment of primitivism, fundamentalism, and restorationism. […]
I keep reminding myself to look beneath and beyond labels and remain focused on the individual. Because ultimately it is the individual who matters most and who is most deserving of praise or condemnation, affection or disdain. It is a surprisingly hard lesson to learn and to remember given the current political and cultural tensions [...]
T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers [...]
It may seem paradoxical to find out that one of the great clarion calls of individuality, modernism, and liberality—“Be yourself”—turns out to be a profound declaration of classical ethics. “Stay true. Be you.” “Stay true to yourself.” “Be who you are.” “Just be yourself.” “You do you.” These slogans are part of the fundamental fabric [...]
The storytelling of a tribe gives each member a common remote past, communal heroes to emulate, shared social rules, and an answer to “Who am I?” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s College, Annapolis, in the year of her 90th birthday. The [...]
What happens when our nation’s fundamental principles or standards are rejected? Jennifer Roback Morse’s new book, The Sexual State, is a lively and forceful examination of where we came from, where we are now, and where we ought to be on matters of human life… Genesis tells us that man was created “male and female.” The [...]
Heather Mac Donald has written a no-holds-barred attack on the modern American university, where the absence of courage is only the tip of a very large and menacing iceberg… The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture by Heather Mac Donald (288 pages, St. Martin’s Press, 2018) This is [...]
"Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence…. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an [...]
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory. – J.R.R. Tolkien Together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat. – Galadriel My kingdom is not of this world. [...]