The history of Sri Lanka through the Fifties to the present time is a sobering reminder to those who fail to see that unrestrained democracy can lead to the tyranny of the majority and that robust diversity is as often a cause of friction and strife as it is a strength to be celebrated. [...]
Furor is the rage in the blood that turns justice into revenge and war into slaughter. Furor is the all-consuming lust that privileges private obsession over public service. Furor is the unadulterated avarice that shatters oaths and smashes kingdoms. It is the incarnate enemy of civilization; where it reigns, there can only be dissolution. No [...]
Contrary to the vast majority of my fellow scholars of American history, I have never found the account of the creation of political parties in the Founding Era and Early Republic to be credible. Admittedly, my position is one of an extremely small minority, so I do not mean to suggest that historians are ready [...]
The “Odyssey” is a wondrous poem. Joe Sachs’ Afterword to his translation is a thought-inducing meditation on wonder, on Homer’s imaginatively and artfully conceived wonders and on Homer’s people, who are—above all, Odysseus—open to wondering and to its ensuing wisdom… the Odyssey by Homer, translated by Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia 2014) Joe Sachs’ [...]
Emptiness is defined negatively as the absence of something. It can involve structures which are not occupied or filled, as in empty bottles. Emptiness can refer to situations lacking reality, substance or meaning, as in empty pleasures. Actions can be empty when they have no consequences, as in empty gestures or threats. […]
With eyes wide open to the degradation we see all around us, we know that things are rotten in the modern world. Who can deny it? And yet there are more Christians in the world today than there have ever been in the past. The Church is not dead… Today’s offering in our Timeless [...]
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a picturesque story that deliberately mirrors the most famous picturesque story of all time: the Biblical story, which culminates in Christ’s death and resurrection, and which in turn brings life back to a lifeless world. “With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien insisted that fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. They show us who we are. They also show us who we are called to be. In this sense, The Lord of the Rings conforms to reality much more clearly and starkly than any works of literary relativism. I am a great admirer [...]
On this Good Friday, as we ponder the suffering Christ endured, we should not forget the pivotal role of that good and decent bureaucrat Pilate in facilitating that crime. Nor forget the bureaucratic crimes committed daily on the sacrificial altars of obedience and expedience. Thus spoke Nietzsche: “Must I add that, in the whole [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara Elliott, as she portrays the events of the Last Supper to Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane from the perspective of the Apostle John. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher I went with Peter to make the arrangements for [...]
I’m glad to see that your age has not forgotten Rome. But please, children of the future, do not think that Rome was only a city or an empire or a people. She was also an idea, the noblest idea the world has ever known. And behind that idea was a single word: pietas. [...]
No writer so early recognized and so credibly exposed the dangerous inadequacies concealed in the Progressive world view than did Mark Twain in his sardonic novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I. By 1912, the triumph of Progressivism was complete. Both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt had advertised themselves as Progressive candidates, [...]
I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. There seems to be a separate, opposed meaning. Should it be called a hidden agenda, a subtext? Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness [...]
Following the recent attack on a mosque in New Zealand by a white supremacist terrorist, I was asked by a national TV network in the UK to appear on a live show to give my perspective as a former white supremacist. (I served two prison sentences for “inciting racial hatred” back in the 1980s.) [...]