The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

Dante on Virtuous Pagans

By |2023-10-04T17:33:44-05:00October 4th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Dante, Great Books, Letters From Dante Series, Louis Markos, Reason, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Virgil, Virtue|

It was there, in the first circle of Hell, that I first understood what it meant to be a virtuous pagan. It meant to be led by the dim but true light of reason, to seek continually after the higher things, to pursue with courage and devotion a life of virtue. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]

Whose Empiricism? What Kind of Rationality?

By |2023-04-18T14:55:45-05:00April 18th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Reason, Religion, Science, Senior Contributors|

If empirical science itself does not lead to atheism, the approach to science that has been taken surely has. For modernity to give way to something better, we need to trust our reason in an expansive sense as a gift of God to know our own hearts and minds—and to know the whole of his [...]

Materialism: The False God of Modern Science

By |2023-03-01T13:50:50-06:00March 1st, 2023|Categories: Existence of God, George Stanciu, Philosophy, Reason, Science, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Trained to believe that every object as well as every act in the universe is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter—that is, schooled to be a materialist—I scoffed at the two fellow students of mine in graduate school who regularly attended church. For me, at that time, the brain was the mind [...]

Reason, Faith, & the Struggle for Western Civilization

By |2023-01-12T17:25:19-06:00January 12th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Faith, History, Philosophy, Pope Benedict XVI, Reason, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

It is a bright note of hope, set against the present daunting darkness, that shines throughout Samuel Gregg’s “Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization,” both illuminating the past and shedding much-needed light on the present situation. Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, by Samuel Gregg (256 pages, Gateway Editions, 2019) “The [...]

A Socratic Response to Revelation

By |2022-10-11T08:19:34-05:00October 10th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Philosophy, Reason, Socrates|

A truly Socratic response to revelation—passive surprise, perplexed skepticism, clarifying refutation, heroic confirmation, relative exceptionalism, creative revision, and persistent service—offers us, perhaps, a way out of the cultural impasse we are in. The parties of reason and revelation seldom treat one another well: Those fond of reason all too often do not believe in revelation [...]

Thoughtful Theism: Redeeming Reason in an Irrational Age

By |2022-05-18T16:23:53-05:00May 18th, 2022|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Faith, Featured, Reason, St. Thomas Aquinas|

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this age’s crisis is not one of faith. If anything, there is plenty of faith around, in both good and bad things. What we lack is that which since the Middle Ages has been seen as a complement to faith: reason. Thoughtful Theism: Redeeming Reason in an Irrational Age by Fr. [...]

Living Well on Earth & Entering Heaven: The Nineteen Types of Judgment

By |2021-08-12T15:12:48-05:00August 10th, 2021|Categories: Christendom, Classics, Liberal Learning, Plato, Reason, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

Making judgments is a privilege of persons only. A privilege that is necessary, both to live well on earth and to enter Heaven. There are at least nineteen different kinds of judgment that we should distinguish. I’m sorry I could not find a twentieth, to match the number of digits on our fingers and toes. But [...]

Hegel’s Romance of Reason

By |2021-07-18T17:08:22-05:00July 18th, 2021|Categories: Peter Kalkavage, Philosophy, Reason, St. John's College|

The romance of reason lays the groundwork for understanding both Hegel’s critique of Romanticism and his indebtedness to it. It helps us see how his "Phenomenology," though critical of Romantic heroes and their cult of feeling, is in its own way a romance of reason. The spirit helps me, suddenly I see counsel And confidently [...]

The Imaginative Conservative: 11 Years of Preserving & Advancing

By |2021-07-09T13:58:09-05:00July 9th, 2021|Categories: Aristotle, Bradley J. Birzer, Cicero, Reason, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

What we held back in 2010 we still hold today: “The Imaginative Conservative” is not meant to be one voice, but many voices forming one voice. The ideologue and the conformist, we equally despise. We want excellence, argument, inquiry. We wish to provide, above all, a safe haven for reason and reasoned passion: We wish [...]

Barfield’s Romantic Logos

By |2021-05-18T16:51:59-05:00May 18th, 2021|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Culture, Imagination, Philosophy, Reason, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization|

Owen Barfield argued that the modern world must readopt the truths of the Logos, should Western Civilization move beyond its current selfish and totalitarian phase. And this rediscovered love of the Logos must express itself throughout culture and the arts. In 1944, over a decade after Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, half a decade after Tolkien’s [...]

Anatomizing Our Schizophrenia

By |2021-04-22T09:29:28-05:00April 19th, 2021|Categories: Culture, Philosophy, Reason, Truth|

Slogans gain resonance more quickly and widely than ever before, so that we are governed by bumper-sticker thinking, and entertainment becomes the supra-ideology of all discourse. In favor of a new inauthentic ‘reality’, we bid farewell to a culture, including its history, and devolve into a state of double vision that extends to cultural, social, [...]

Faith, Reason, and Eternal Happiness

By |2021-04-02T15:04:16-05:00April 2nd, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Faith, Michael De Sapio, Reason, Senior Contributors, St. Thomas Aquinas|

In “Theology: Mythos or Logos?” John Médaille accuses Thomas Aquinas of posing a quarrel between faith and reason, a separation that has had baleful consequences in Western culture. However, the problem that troubles Mr. Médaille appears not to be a problem if we examine the text of the “Summa” more closely. In a previous essay [...]

Is Christianity a Story?

By |2021-02-01T20:41:07-06:00February 2nd, 2021|Categories: Books, Christianity, Faith, Michael De Sapio, Myth, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology|

If we accept that Christianity is a story, emphasize the primacy of faith, and deemphasize historical testimony, are we not merely reduced to telling our different stories, without being able to point to anything as having compelling objective truth? The mythopoetic appeal of Christianity is strong and valid. Yet there has to be something that [...]

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