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 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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“Sense and Sensibility” is a profound achievement of romantic realism. Jane Austen demonstrates that to surrender oneself to romantic sensibility is the highway to ruin, but that the unity of logos and eros is beautiful and wholesome. Jane Austen, to my mind, was the preeminent romantic realist writer. Born into a modest clerical family, she [...]
As Robert R. Reilly explains in “America on Trial,” the United States restored the founding of government based on reason in a Constitution that produced the most successful government experiment in history. If the American Founding was a rational and social success, why has the American experiment now come under modern attack? America on Trial: [...]
How does one find the obstinacy, the calm, the strength to glow with the Beautiful and the True in the midst of a raging storm? I think about a small argument in chapter 13 of the “Summa Contra Gentiles,” the work which, when my heart slows its hammering, gives my mind peace. I am at [...]
In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of God: [...]
At the end of the film, Farinelli’s smile meant peace. It was the peace of a man who loved, of a man who had accepted his fate, of a man who had a future, of a man who was no longer the judge and standard—despite having suffered unjustly. It was the peace of a man [...]