The West's primary threat still lies in the East. And yet, like the late Romans and Byzantines—and the Roman captives whom Saint Patrick encountered—we are poised to surrender people, churches, monuments, and lands rather than stand our ground. Last Spring, I read a biographical novel about Saint Patrick. We do not have much firsthand information [...]
Not only do democracies invade every aspect of life and politicize them, they always and everywhere—from Athens to America—serve as an impetus to imperialism. If the will of the majority is to rule at home, why not enforce such rule the world over? John Adams & Benjamin Franklin “Remember Democracy never lasts long. [...]
A political system, however efficient, cannot be good if it clashes with ethics. We have to work for the restoration of local autonomy. There are things in which centralized control is necessary and beneficent; but there is a vast multitude of things in which it is unnecessary, and derogatory to human freedom and responsibility. Man [...]
None of us wants a theocracy, nor do we wish to have a totally secularized order. But both secular and sacred are to be joined in some way, the only question being how and to what extent. Have we still got a Christian consensus around which Americans of every possible persuasion can rally round? A public [...]
On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech that shocked many, amused some, and inspired more. Attending the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, Reagan decided to address the topic of sin and evil in the modern world. Drawing significantly upon C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Reagan offered a [...]
What is it that finally holds a society together? What enables it to cohere? Nothing less, St. John Henry Newman reminds us, “than a common reverence for a certain sacred possession.” Does anyone know what the central myth of America might be? I mean, isn’t there a story out there we tell ourselves about our origins? Our [...]
Rarely has one speech created a whole new political condition. While Winston Churchill did not create the Cold War, he gave the amorphous condition plaguing relations between the free and Communist worlds a new dramatic image in his phrase about an Iron Curtain descending upon Europe. “We looked for peace, and there is no good; [...]
Ours is the first nation under God which makes no real provision for God in its public life, owing to a great and sundering wall of separation between Church and State, religion and politics, faith and life. We live in a country whose citizenry have been, almost from the beginning of the Republic, carefully coached to [...]
Ronald Reagan’s version of conservatism was far more pro-government than was Barry Goldwater’s. Compassion, not liberty, was Reagan’s guide. This raises the question: To what extent is the success of modern political conservatism dependent upon the conservation of liberal, even progressive, reforms? The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism [...]
For all those out there wondering, including my first-grade art teacher who never learned how to pronounce it, my surname is actually pronounced with a long rather than short “e.” It’s “DEE-vuhl” and not “Devil.” But the moniker of a demon has been applied to me so often that I have decided to make demon-ade. [...]
Christopher Dawson greatly admired John Henry Newman, for he understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries the coming war of the Church against the ideologues bred by the French Revolution, utilitarianism, and secularization. As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the [...]
A profound Christian influence in small things still lingers despite these brutal and atheistic times. Those who defend tradition must fight tooth and nail to defend what is still Christian in the present culture, wherever it is found—even in fonts. As the Culture War rages, no field is exempt from its reach. Much has been [...]
Edmund Burke contended that, far from creating peace, the French Revolution had generated the greatest despotism the world had yet seen, politicizing all things and enslaving the vast majority of the population. Of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) four Letters on a Regicide Peace—his final work, written while he rested on his deathbed—the fourth is, by far, [...]
The leftist man fears the Christian ideal of manhood. He trembles in the face of its purity. He is terrified by its chivalry. He is afraid of its manly prayer. He even fears its compassion. Far from the meek caricature of the Nietzsche world, with the help of supernatural grace, the virtuous Christian man can [...]