The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
The music of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener is the music of a new civilization. These composers have gone against the prevailing grain of the twentieth century for the sake of a greater love. The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music’s [...]
God was not absent in the darkest corner of Europe during the horrors of World War II, but he was planting the seed in Poland in the combined work of a hidden nun and a dynamic pope, which would burst through the darkness. As we traveled across Poland on a recent parish pilgrimage, we watched [...]
Poland’s reforms and constitution, Edmund Burke thought, offered real meaning, much closer to the experience of the American Revolution than that of the French Revolution. In significant ways, the Polish king succeeded because he embraced the laws of nature and “the array of Justice” without forcing anything of his own will upon his people. Stanislaw [...]
It might be tempting to characterize Pope John Paul II as the political foe who vanquished communism. But that would be untrue. His position challenged communism in the metaphysical realm, not in the political arena. He understood that the error of communism lay in its fundamental understanding of man, who is not merely a unit [...]
Though they should be on the same side in their opposition to globalism, Russia and Poland have recently entered into an unholy spat over the history of World War II. The Russian Ambassador to Poland stated recently in an interview with the Russian news site rbc.ru that relations between Russia and Poland are “the worst [...]
All is not well between the nation state and empire: Centre and periphery have their rules which at times collide, as witnessed of late. Are there any possible guiding principles that could minimize the force of collision? In 1887 the optometrist Ludwik Zamenhof published the fruits of his passion for constructing an artificial language in [...]
What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players, busy in their everyday lives, to spend a week in a far-off place and inundate themselves in practice and education concerning a single piece of music and its composer—the sort of exercise usually reserved for professionals. […]
On July 6 in Warsaw, the President of the United States spoke with timeless eloquence about the need to defend the West against those who “threaten over time to undermine our individual freedom and sovereignty and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are”… In the mid-nineteenth century, the [...]
These are troubling times. Europe is apparently on the verge of meltdown. Unable to withstand the heat caused by the growing friction between the European Union and its member states, especially as the former tries to force an open-door immigration policy on its subject nations, there are fears that the melting pot might be melting. [...]
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]