The surrender to sin in America is a species of Satanism. Whether through seduction or submission, depravity is the mantra of the modern world and the modern world makes excuse readily available. I am weak. Human beings are only human. As long as no one gets hurt… If it feels good… The vindications go on [...]
The disordered souls of the tyrannical mob, in projecting their power through the individual tyrant that they select as their leader, will all suffer by being betrayed and disowned by the tyrant. And what more could be expected? Plato gives an account in the ninth book of the Republic of how a tyrannical soul is [...]
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is not a call to activism or a program for some version of social justice. It is, rather, a manifesto of political and social libertarianism that displays both the strengths and weaknesses of that trend in American thought. Henry David Thoreau’s long essay, first published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government,” [...]
Teach us almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past. — from Jane [...]
What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst [...]
On Presidents’ Day, in the week that the Republican presidential candidates were crisscrossing my home state of South Carolina, I stumbled across an essay in a magazine that tells how you can find the gigantic busts of forty-three American presidents standing broken and decaying in a farmer’s field in Virginia. The essay is full of dramatic [...]
Of the perennial debates in political theory, perhaps none is more enduring or contentious than that regarding the extent of power that human beings possess over their political and social order. This question is as old as political philosophy itself, with Plato taking up the question of the best society in his Republic. Since then, [...]
The effect of actions based on self-interest turned loose from any anchor in morality is not an adequate basis of economic or social organization. The sphere of legitimate market activity must be limited so that it harmonizes with the rest of the community and with other values. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords [...]
One of my favourite sayings of G. K. Chesterton is his quip that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. When I first heard this paradoxical witticism I was somewhat scandalized by it. I had always been taught, as I suspect had most people, that if a thing is worth doing, [...]
T.S. Eliot’s slim book about moral and immoral fiction may surprise anyone who first comes upon a copy. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy consists of three lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933. These present an uncompromising denunciation of liberalism—both the liberalism of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth [...]
French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) created an impressive oeuvre of fine films. I first encountered him through the DVD box-set from The Criterion Collection containing six of his films known as the “Six Moral Tales.” The set also contains a 262-page paperback book of the six stories that Rohmer originally wrote, upon which he later [...]
The American Founders considered the cultivation of virtue essential to the survival of the republic. The following is excerpted from Franklin’s Autobiography, on which he worked between 1771 and 1790, but which was not published in English in its complete form until 1868. Below, we have maintained faithfulness to the original text. It was about [...]
Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own Hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own Souls. — from Jane Austen’s Prayers “Henry Crawford had too much sense not to feel the [...]
We in the West are deeply formed by how the three great cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome dealt with the meaning of human existence, and in turning back to these sources, we rediscover the resources for cultural renewal and the reversal of our present decline. Aboard the Arbella in 1630, John Winthrop penned “A [...]