In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of God: [...]
The arrival of the summer months signals joy for many, and their departure is a reminder of another year gone by. Pastoral poetry, however, is special because it allows us to contemplate our “ripening of age” and to view it along the course of nature as a process filled with beauty—both in its blossoming and [...]
We cannot interpret our past or approach the future based upon the assumption that individuals and groups are mere passive chess pieces. We must more appreciate the constraints of the earth, without capitulating to them with aggression or inertia. In 1440, at the heart of the Rhine Valley, Johannes Gutenberg perfected the first European printing [...]
William Wordsworth’s introspection in “Tintern Abbey” leads him to attempt to answer the question we ask with our curriculum at our college: How does the experience of unforgettable natural beauty in the full vitality of youth affect the moral and spiritual life that follows? As all the world should know, the curriculum at Wyoming Catholic [...]
Time, it will turn out, is a kind of intuiting, indeed the matrix of all intuiting, but it is not therefore to be intuited, that is, looked at, rather than thought out. The moving pictures that Hegel himself suggests to illustrate the emerging determinations of thought are only concessions to our ordinarily representational minds. This [...]
Charles Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest remains a sacred idea in science—no indeed, in modern Western culture. The imagined war of every organism against every other represents a profound enculturation of science, prejudicing theories and obscuring the facts. The evidence, however, clearly shows that nature is not competitive but cooperative. “Charles Darwin [...]
Relationship is integral to any story, and more so as the environment itself interacts with a clearly human personality. Willa Cather’s land can reflect the many paradoxes within us to show us more of ourselves, all the greater reason to see her settings as characters of value, power, and influence. In the world of story, [...]
Dandelion Wine is a summer read if ever there was one. I know quite a few Ray Bradbury lovers who read it as a summer ritual, and for good reason. From the first moments when we meet Douglas Spaulding, we know his life is one of imagination and adventure. In Dandelion Wine, Doug is tantalized [...]
Our capacity to grasp universals and natural laws sets us apart from the other animals, and, in that sense, we are apart from nature. Human beings in some mysterious way transcend space and time; through science, philosophy, and art, we rise above nature. We live in time, yet touch the timeless. Several years ago, Fortuna, [...]
Last winter lies vanquished, Sprawled under lolling hills of green, Strangled amid red-berried brambles, Smothered deep beneath bare feet stomping along forest paths. Winter’s proud tyranny, Now humbled by the lilting laugh of children And drowned in dreams of unconquerable sun. […]
For modern Westerners, nature is opaque, mute, transmits no message, and holds no key to existence. But in reality, nature reveals the supernatural; a rock is never merely a rock, or a bird just a flying machine, or a human being an animal that appears between one nothingness and another. Nature always expresses the transcendent. [...]
The imagination is a gift from God, given in His own image, to conceive of a Glorious Reality that does exist, that we cannot yet fully see... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Aaron Ames, as he considers the Divine source of beauty and imagination.—W. Winston Elliott [...]
What ought to take primacy when carrying out research and interpreting seminal books: the text itself, or the context? A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in 1957 in the Journal of Politics and introduced a problem with the field: Modern academic obsessions over positivism [...]
Few artists have captured the essence of America’s industrial urbanism with the precision of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). His images depict an intricate landscape shaped by factories and railroads, and by the collision of traditional European forms with the novelty of American, electric-lit night. His human subjects manifest a pervasive sense of alienation among individuals of [...]