Critical theorists seek to confuse concepts through the manipulation of language and promote ideas that fail to correspond to reality. Academic theories designed to confuse rather than to clarify must be confronted with calm reason. This is the most charitable thing we can do for those who will come after us. Self-evident Truths It can [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win. Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a bachelor’s [...]
Jesus Christ revealed none of the scientific knowledge that it is possible for man to acquire by the use of his own reason. He confirmed the truth of that which reason can attain concerning God and the human soul, besides enlightening us regarding that sphere of truth which is inaccessible to reason, that is to [...]
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a "cultural Protestant." As such, he "applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come." Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, [...]
Natural and supernatural reality are both subject to reason. If the natural is divorced from reason, it leads to the irrational reductionism of rationalism. If the supernatural is divorced from reason, it leads to superstition. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet’s words to his [...]
Although Pythagorean mathematics bears little resemblance to what we find in today’s textbooks, its foundation was laid by ancient lovers of wisdom. By rediscovering its original significance, mathematics might guide our minds not toward engineering aimed at mastering nature, but toward contemplation, preparing us for deeper contact with the realm of spirit and its magnificent, [...]
Human beings have an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to have life and the world make sense. Yet, there are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the [...]
May we always defend like Socrates and Cicero and Thomas More. May we always preserve like the monks of Lindesfarne. May we always see the world through the eyes of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot. May we always cherish the humanity and the divinity of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. [...]
If we fail to inspire this next generation to pursue that which is True, Good, and Beautiful, I shudder to think at the consequences. Groupthink will destroy all that we hold dear. We want our students to polish their reason and to prepare to guide and navigate their chariots along the track of life. It [...]
What makes freedom possible is beyond all knowing, but what makes the moral law possible is freedom itself. The fact that we have a faculty of freedom is the critical ground of the possibility of morality. I have called this lecture “Kant’s Imperative” so that I might begin by pointing up an ever-intriguing circumstance. Kant [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]