Chesterton recognized that heart and hearth, work and worth, are all of a piece. Human flourishing is found in families, human wholeness in holiness. Civilization depends on faith—faith both in the transcendent horizon that many call God, but also faith in reason, and in the ability of human intelligence to grasp objective truth. by [...]
Our civilized world is passing out of one age and into another epoch. The age that is passing has been called the Age of Discussion. The age that we are entering I call the Age of Sentiments. Most people are aware of this change only vaguely, if at all. As Disraeli put it, “Prevailing opinions [...]
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly The authors of this latest attempt to give life “meaning” and to “uncover the wonder” of the world—concealed, as it has been, by modern technological culture—begin their argument with an episode. In 2007, a young [...]
Photo by Felipe Vanancio Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin, modernity was a “Gnostic revolt” against reality: the [...]
Recent liberal successes, such as the ongoing redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships, dramatize the failure of social conservatism in public discussion. What is most striking to conservatives about the situation is the conviction among intelligent and influential people that conservative social views are altogether baseless, so that adherence to them is an intellectual [...]
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to disappear: the world, in truth, is more modern than ever. So we must contest Hegel’s assertion that the modern world is the end, the fulfillment, of history. The [...]
This material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race…. No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that [...]
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it seems to me, is divided between people who use that language earnestly in the belief that it is a sign of scientific precision and sophistication and those who [...]
With Baz Luhrmann’s garish 3D hip-hop adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rolling into theaters this week, my thoughts turn to a piece from last June’s Guardian in which novelist Jay McInerney (no relation) reflected on why Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel has become an American classic–and more than a classic: “a defining document of [...]
Mr. Ropoulos and I were talking in the St. John’s College Coffee Shop, and the subject of modernity came up. So he asked me to write a few pages for his issue of the Gadfly (ed., the St. John’s student paper). “Modernity” comes from Latin modo, “just-now.” Thus modernity is any generation’s own time; it [...]
“The worst lies,” declared the French writer Georges Bernanos, “are problems wrongly stated.“ How applicable that observation is to so many concerns at present, not least the tragic events that took place in Boston. The chatter that fills the airwaves with speculation about the ideology that motivated two young men to detonate bombs on a [...]
America, that bright, shining land of freedom, opportunity, and progress, is irredeemably corrupt. It is in the hands of debased and hypocritical politicians, judges, businessmen, and their servants, such as the debauched Hollywood film maker Jack Woltz, the belligerent New York police captain Mark McCluskey, the rapacious Las Vegas gambler Moe Greene, and the contemptible [...]
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.—Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue MacIntyre’s brilliant critique of modernity and its many failings was published almost thirty years ago. Its many [...]
“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say.[1] He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding.[2] It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. [...]