Allan Bloom’s diagnosis in The Closing of the American Mind can explain far more about the sorry state of American higher education and the Western condition than popular stories that blame the Enlightenment, or democracy, or medieval nominalism. And it is therefore a valuable starting point… Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Allan Bloom’s [...]
“Utopia” is an instructive call to return to the radical Christianity of Christ, to the purity and simplicity of His words, as the only way of saving mankind from ourselves. Thomas More’s Utopia remains one of the most puzzling and paradoxical treatises on the ideal state. In order to elucidate More’s true ideas and judgments, [...]
The Mayberry that we see in the first few seasons of “The Andy Griffith Show” is systematically undermined, desecrated, and destroyed by the iconoclasm of sixties’ ideological hedonism. Believe it or not, I had never heard of Andy Griffith until I was forty years old. For some reason, The Andy Griffith Show had never made [...]
The Last Jedi seems intent on burning down the archetypes of the heroic past. When the hero fails to be a hero, and furthermore denies his own status as a hero, what is the rationality behind such postmodern disenchantment? Moviegoers have loudly lamented the Luke Skywalker they encountered in Rian Johnson’s newest episode of the [...]
If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to glimpse. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]
Members of democratic nations, especially Americans, have almost unlimited personal freedom because the constraints of class, local communities, and family have been greatly weakened. But we are also free to choose to step off the consumer treadmill, refuse to seek material success for us alone, and attempt to serve others, materially, emotionally, and spiritually. In [...]
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot gives us a terrifying gaze at the spiritual reality of the world. All men are cracked, thirsty and longing for death… “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / by this, and this only, we have existed / which is not [...]
Winston Churchill, who is the subject of Martin Gilbert’s book, comes out of it all a towering public figure—an inspiring wartime leader who never lost his confidence in the darkest hours of the war, a man of enormous vitality and energy, unsparing of himself, but who never lost an opportunity to enjoy what life had [...]
There is a way out of postmodernism: courage. You do not reason yourself out of the postmodern, you fight your way out. You realize that logic can only take you so far. Then you have a decision to make. And you make it. Western civilization is founded on this one faith, this one great volitional [...]
Logical positivism and countless similar philosophies have all eventually passed. Thus, it seems, that postmodernism will likely suffer the same fate. However, until that day arrives, let us be Cheerful Soldiers, emboldened by the knowledge of just how temporary those foundations are upon which philosophical fashions are rested… “The vogue of each particular maxim of [...]
Poetry is able to grant the reader the ability to perceive that reality, in spite of its often chaotic and random appearance, has some underlying unity by which it is bound together. This insight, in turn, provides the terms by which one may make peace with the world... A 2012 survey found that only 6.7% [...]
To see Paul Cezanne only as a seed of Modern art is to misunderstand the magnitude of his accomplishment… Paul Cézanne For nearly a century, we have seen Paul Cezanne through the eyes of his disciples. They have given us the popular and concretized version of who the painter was. A version to [...]
Bruce Timm’s Batman is a critical marker for modern Western civilization, reminding us that the war is always worth waging, even in the twilight… Bruce Timm Twenty-five years ago, on September 5, 1992, a very young Bruce Timm aired the first episode of a self-contained but what would become an expansive universe, now [...]
Our situation is a gift, for God will give each of us who ask for it the grace to endure the darkness, barbarism, and loss of our customary sensible and cultural signs of God’s love and presence… Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideology can see clearly what has [...]