What is it about J.R.R Tolkien that speaks so powerfully? What are the roots of his enchanting genius? In my editorial for the new Tolkien theme issue of the St. Austin Review, I state that the very word “Tolkien” has great power of enchantment. Seeing it, or hearing it spoken, brings to life strange and [...]
Few would dispute the claim that C.S. Lewis was the last century’s greatest Christian apologist, rivaled only by G.K. Chesterton and Pope John Paul II. While all three wrote voluminously, Lewis’s books had the broadest appeal. Even atheists read Lewis’s Christian books, if only for the art of them. Surely, we can do better than [...]
Eva Brann’s latest book, “Pursuits of Happiness,” is a collection of essays which range from Aeschylus to Austen, with topics spanning the nature of time itself to Sacred Scripture. Interspersed here are two parts constituting the whole of an ideal education. Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested by Eva Brann (640 pages, Paul Dry Books, [...]
The culture of a real community like that of college isn’t simply a matter of texts and discussions of ideas, but of live emotion and thought, real presence to each other, a continuous awareness and exchange that locates each person in the larger community. Yesterday afternoon, during one of our regular meetings with the freshman [...]
Any attempt to mould Shakespeare into the image of what Evelyn Waugh called “our own deplorable epoch” is ridiculously absurd, and “queer theorists” who seek to do so should not be taken seriously as scholars or critics. If these critics were able to empathise with the past, they would see Shakespeare’s sonnets as they truly [...]
Obianuju Ekeocha’s “Target Africa” exposes the imposition of destructive, elite American values on Africans by our government, our educational institutions, and our foundations. These “neo-colonialists” treat Africans as children by handing down to them decisions about how to live—decisions that have failed spectacularly in the Western world itself. Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism In The Twenty-First [...]
As the shadow of COVID lifts, let’s hope the thriving business of literary pilgrimages will regain its buoyancy and help us connect the stories that motivate and inspire us with the reality of today’s world. I attended the same high school in Pennsylvania as John Updike. His father bought his pants from my Dad’s clothing [...]
Love, as the foundational principle of a loving society, is analogous to the arithmetic which forms the foundations of rocket science. Today, however, we live in a society that does not know the basic laws of love. Our society must once again learn to love, turning its back on pride, or it will destroy itself [...]
The only apt comparisons to the Biden-Harris law-and-policy agenda are the New Deal and the Great Society. But how does the political and popular mandate for the current administration's agenda compare to those of these past programs? President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris purport both to rule expansively and permanently alter the country [...]
Music held a notable place within Thomas Jefferson's cultured and humanistic life—a point reinforced by his insistence on having music instruction at his newly founded University of Virginia. This shows the importance Jefferson placed on music in the life of the mind, just as his involvement with music throughout his life enhances his image as [...]
So, you’re attracted to imaginative conservatism, and you’re wondering how such a school of thought came about. The roots, to be sure, are planted firmly in the first half of the twentieth century as a number of diverse thinkers strove to fight populism and progressivism (left and right, gentle and severe) in all their myriad [...]
In the process of taming the wilderness of the New World by violent means, Americans absorbed and bequeathed to future generations some of the savagery that they determined to eliminate. Their purpose was to establish and maintain a civilization, but we have now lost this sense of purpose. Savagery is the product, then, not of [...]
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is often taught poorly, if even taught at all. At the root of the problem is the tendency to remain trapped in hell, never venturing forth into purgatory and paradise. This is a consequence of the way that Dante has been taught for decades—indeed, for centuries. Lovers of the Great Books argue [...]
For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]