Humans may be greedy and wicked in their heads and still appear generous and good to the world. Humans may pose as wise and sagacious and yet be full of foolishness. The Pharisees had so focused on the exterior that their inner compass was awry. Luke 11:37-41 sees Jesus dining with a Pharisee whose heart [...]
What do the films of Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take it With You, Lady for a Day, Lost Horizon, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, etc.), the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music, The King and I, Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, [...]
At the heart of Owen Barfield’s thought is the concept of participation—the psychic unity between the perceiving self and the external phenomena it encounters. While Barfield’s theories are fascinating, he seems perhaps too pessimistic about humanity’s loss of vision. Owen Barfield was sometimes called “the silent Inkling.” C.S. Lewis called him “the wisest and best [...]
Between the omnipotence of God, who holds all creation in being, and the impotence of men, who possess no claim whatsoever on being, there remains an impassible barrier which no creature may presume to breach. Even the best and the brightest among us are forced to submit to that exigent fact. So utterly ill-equipped are [...]
Socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field? At age 58, I can state with utter earnestness that one of the most devastating things of our present age is [...]
There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with Irving Babbitt’s work as with that of any serious thinker. The proper question for scholars to ask would appear to be: Do Babbitt’s various concepts faithfully account for the facts of human experience? In other words: Is he providing a scientific analysis of [...]
Eric Voegelin stressed that progress falsely demands the sacrifice both of man and God. With history and progress as false gods, the man who would attempt to derail or thwart history is the sinner and may thus, justifiably, be removed, even if by bloody force. In my previous essay, I considered the ways in which [...]
Perhaps prison was the very best place to read the "Inferno." Gustave Doré’s engravings on the overhead embellished my lectures, and I immediately noticed my jump-suited students raptly attentive to his vivid representations of Hell’s punishments. “What happens if you’re guilty of more than one of these?” one sheepishly asked. No one laughed. The department [...]
In "Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears," Hungarian philosopher of art László Földényi shows how the Enlightenment brought about a radical shift in the understanding of the human body, and the consequences that arose from the attempt to divorce the physical body from its metaphysical context. Dostoyevskey Reads Hegel in Siberia and [...]
Today we hear well-meaning appeals for civility, bipartisanship, compromise, dialogue, and common ground. Admirable aspirations, these. But there is a proper order that is often lost in our civic workshops: The search for truth must begin before the quest for common ground. On a recent summer evening, a friend entertained several of us with nothing [...]
The books we read this past year in the high-school class I dubbed “Evil 12” so accurately portray evil—whether horrific and nightmarish or subtle and uncanny—that they lead the reader to recognize and love goodness all the more. Indeed, each conveys the depths of both evil and goodness in imitation of the Gospel. This past [...]
Our continued success as a country is dependent upon a recovery of our appreciation of liberty, the original division of power, and the renewal of personal responsibility for perpetuating the regime. As we celebrate American Independence, it is appropriate to reflect upon the foundations of our liberty that the American Founding—especially the Founders' Declaration of [...]
We do not see or know ourselves as idolators, but that is because we do not know ourselves well enough, or see how we honour our wayward needs, pamper our desires, sacrifice important things on the bonfire of our own vanities, or place ourselves unconsciously ahead of God and neighbour. Mark 12: 28-34 marks a [...]
Because it is based on natural laws and timeless truths, the republic can be ignored, it can be mocked, and it can be forgotten, but it can never be fully undone. All it takes is an anamnesis, something to rouse us from our slumbers and reassert its many truths and goodnesses and beauties. Long live [...]