At its finest, the new conception of nature enabled people to appreciate, and wish to safeguard, the natural environment on which life depends. At its worst, this reverence for the natural world gave rise to a mindless sentimentality that regarded all human activity as harmful and exploitive. I. The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North [...]
There's a pace to reading that corresponds to walking, and probably to thought itself; the followers of Aristotle are called the “peripatetics,” a word that means “those who walk to and fro”... At the end of this week, the fifty-two new freshmen at Wyoming Catholic College descend from the mountains where they have spent the [...]
Michio Kaku has made a name for himself as a world-leading theoretical physicist unafraid to speak his mind. Dr. Kaku, the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York, has published more than 70 articles in physics journals on topics such as supersymmetry, superstring theory, supergravity, and hadronic [...]
As modern art has drifted away from traditional Beauty, it has also abandoned Truth and Goodness, rejecting God, religion, and nature in one fell swoop… “Guernica,” by Pablo Picasso (1937) To engage in dialogue about beauty and art is to navigate a tricky mire. Regardless of the exact point of contention, there are [...]
Some dream of a time when we will achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the brain into a computer. But is this truly possible?… I have just read a fascinating and, to my mind, cheerful article, by the research psychologist Robert Epstein, on why your brain is not a computer—for the simple reason that your brain does not store memories [...]
The world may ultimately be broken down, not into atoms or elements or quanta of energy, but into something like “pixels” or units of information. These build up into the impressions of things that are the objects of our consciousness, constituting the other half of reality. Will the world end with a bang, or just [...]
Majesty, beauty, ferocity, personality—all these traits typify the settings Willa Cather employs in her writings. More lush and alive than I could have imagined, these fullest of descriptions drew me to her work. When I first read O Pioneers!, I wanted to be there in Hanover, Nebraska. I wanted to work the hard land, to [...]
What was Ernest Hemingway illustrating about the emptiness of the generation in which he lived when he wrote A Farewell to Arms in 1929? If we unthinkingly pursue pleasure and live for nothing except ourselves, what are we left with? In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway portrays the character of Frederic Henry as a [...]
“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, [...]
Human nature exists, and we cannot deal with life in a sensible way without accepting that. So the question we face is how to overcome an outlook that categorically rejects the very concept and is deeply rooted in the way the people who dominate our political life understand the world… Today’s offering in our Timeless [...]
Every person we meet in ordinary, daily affairs is part human and part divine, a storytelling self, often confused, dislikable, and in pain, but always transient; and a mysterious self, deathless, an image of God, worthy of unconditional love… The Buddha, at the age of thirty-five, preached his first sermon to five ascetics, his old [...]
On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and [...]
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. Why is a sentence from C.S. Lewis delightful while an equally true statement by another, ordinary writer, is not? “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun [...]
Our first national artistic movement, the Hudson River School provided a balm to a public searching for the concrete, the real, and the beautiful in an age of increasing abstraction. It takes its place in the long and glorious Western tradition as a body of art which continues to provide refreshment, enchantment and wonder... “Truly [...]