As an anthropologist and folklorist, Andrew Lang believed that fairy tales and folklore serve as records of the past in the cultural realm, much like the tradition of common law in the legal realm. Through the study of cultural norms and folkways, one can understand the mores of the present. Some men should never [...]
Gratitude remains the only key that unshackles us and lets us breathe free. We all unthinkingly use the phrase “the gift of life,” but it is only a gift if we really think of it as such. Myth is not fiction. Myth is truth that ignores the facts. Myths are the tales we tell [...]
The word for truth in Greek means the absence of forgetting—the sudden recollection, the vivid recovery. In the great tradition of the West, when those who study it retrieve immense and priceless knowledge from forgetfulness, we find the hope of renewal. As we approach Thanksgiving this year, the coronavirus phenomenon helps us value rightly [...]
I have no memory of my father, and I don’t have the same precious treasures as my two older brothers do to pull out in times of great sorrow or great joy. I’m sure my lack of having a father has affected me in ways I’ll never understand. Such is God’s providence in this [...]
While 2021 will doubtless be an improvement over 2020, some grounding in the fundamental nature of the political order will prove useful. We can dispense with the contemporary political studies for a moment and perhaps consider the higher potentialities of politics. Here are a few books worth reading and giving as gifts: […]
The unequal clash between Big Power and the little man sounds daunting, but empires come and go. Goliaths are slain. Or more often they kill themselves through their own inherent unsustainability. All that we need to do is resist evil by living virtuously. This last election has been about Goliath versus the People, and [...]
In our zeal to articulate how Christianity has shaped civilization, we are apt to neglect the specific role of prayer. The good, the true, and the beautiful fostered by our civilization have been initiated and sustained by prayer. If one does not pray, what measure of human cultivation is one missing? Art and Prayer: [...]
Big Tech want to impose upon us all a kind of insane and inhumane conformity. Yet, the critical point is that they do not impose themselves upon us as much as we let them impose themselves upon us. So, the most important thing we can do is exit. The following essay was originally a [...]
The 2019 film “Fighting With My Family,” though not life-changing, is a nice change of pace from the movies where doing one’s own thing is depicted as the heroic, authentic thing. It is pleasantly anti-modern in its conception of family and work, as the family’s good is portrayed as more important than self-doubts about [...]
There are certain tools that can help in the writing process. Think of a keyboard, for example, as the equivalent of a rock musician’s guitar. Just as a musician would only want to perform before an audience with a quality guitar, a professional or serious writer will definitely want to invest in a good [...]
In his tragedy “Othello,” Shakespeare censures the age in which King James I renewed the persecution of Catholics in England, with a tale of darkness, told with the doom-laden and crushing weight of the playwright’s own heavy heart. Othello is the first of a triumvirate of tragedies written by Shakespeare during a particularly dark [...]
The dangers associated with the imperial presidency are compounded by an awareness that, while new and more expansive theories of executive authority are seriously advanced, the office is not attracting individuals of high moral and intellectual character. The Philadelphia Constitution may be dead, but the basic problems which troubled the Framers—e.g., preserving the rule [...]
Once the British had returned to first principles and right reason, Edmund Burke argued, they would also be reminded of the practical things, such as good government, the cultivation of the middle class, and the protection of property. In other words, through the fight against the French Revolution, the British would return to being [...]
American history is a subject that has suffered from bad teaching, and public education in general is profoundly deforming in so many ways these days. This is why John Niemann, a veteran teacher at classical schools in the Twin Cities, saw a need several years ago and met it with the Saint John Paul [...]