The love of beauty as such is one of the things that can attract men to the God who is infinitely beautiful. But is it the case that we ought to pursue beauty only to the extent that it is joined to some function? A previous essay of mine published in this journal made passing reference [...]
The question of the purpose of peace has troubled humanity from the time an ancient hand was first raised in anger. It is one thing to win a war and impose peace on a vanquished enemy, and altogether another thing to cultivate one’s own victorious city or nation once the wolf has been held at [...]
We are in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued, not only mimesis, but what is perhaps the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing. Theologian Gil Bailie was a personal [...]
Government remains limited in civil society because God gave man the ability, through work and reason, to subdue the earth and thereby improve his life by the use of private property. Understanding Locke John Locke is one of the few major philosophers who can be used to provide a theoretical and moral foundation for American [...]
What can be said of the way that the abstract work speaks to us—despite the fact that its “content” is untranslatable into words and concepts—is that in its very inability to speak, the work expresses the sense of alienation from a once-familiar and shared artistic life-world. Is the avant-garde then a tragedy or a happy [...]
There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]
It’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. But religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, [...]
Friendship is a precious jewel, and Aristotle was right in viewing it as having the luminous glow of virtue. But what should be said of “holy friendship” rooted in Christ, sharing in His love for the loved one? Those blessed by grace, who live up to the Christian canons of friendship, will have a taste [...]
Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]
Natural law terrifies the left, which assumed it had long ago died. Leftists cannot admit that there might be those who welcome ordered liberty and restraint. They cannot see that nihilism awaits on the other side of a flawed legal positivist system that will lead to every mode of emptiness and despair. The left is [...]
If American philosopher William James offers no systematic defense of religion as Aquinas did, that was never his intent; what he does is show that faith is in tune with man’s nature, experience, and aspirations. That, it seems to me, is nothing to disparage and indeed something to celebrate. Preparing a study guide recently for [...]
In these darkest of present moments, the smallest of actions, like telling the truth and living out the natural law—actions that in former ages would be simple common sense—are now sanctified and sanctifying. There are no more Common Men: only the choice between being a shade blown about in the tempest, adding to the darkness, [...]
Niccolo Machiavelli may help modern man to think more clearly about power and prudence, and to remember that the world is a dangerous place where all is not as it seems. An argument can be made that Niccolo Machiavelli’s sinister reputation is unjust. This is not to gloss over the very deep flaws in the [...]
Great Books fanaticism ignores the audience and in so doing reveals its parochialism, its innocence towards history. We no longer live in a book-dominated culture; to treat our students as though we did is to violate their very psychic structure. Today we enter a new kind of Middle Ages, but Great Books people still absent-mindedly [...]