Archaisms renew the language; they are the means by which language is renovated and restored to its original splendor. It is the old things that make all things new. The “coming peril” was not Bolshevism, G.K. Chesterton said in 1927, only ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was “standardization by a low standard.” For [...]
A fascinating new documentary, "Secrets of Blackmoor" tells the story of the inventors of "Dungeons & Dragons," the role-playing phenomenon that transformed gaming into something organic, non-mechanical, and deeply imaginative. When the fantasy-role playing game Dungeons & Dragons first appeared in 1974 as a full product, it listed two authors: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. [...]
Jane Eyre is a perennial novel for me. Yes, I teach it every year, but more importantly, I reread it every time. Not just a skim. A full read. And this is why. 1. Jane is a character of such growth. I know, I know. Brontë includes much of her own life and experiences in the [...]
Liberal arts students are “generalists in a specialized world,” and as a result, they bring many analogies to bear on the problems that they will face on a daily basis in the world of work. And those analogies come from what they actually study, from Homer to field science to statistical analysis to metaphysics. Back [...]
I like the idea of celebrating “homo faber”—man the maker or worker. Work is something that is part of our dignity, a triumph of the human spirit. The celebration of work is something desperately needed in our culture today. “Why are we celebrating Labor Day? You don’t belong to a labor union,” one of [...]
It is both seemly and right to feel love and even erotic passion, but when such feelings are taken to an improper extreme or directed toward an improper object, they grow twisted and perverse and morph into the sin of lust. We will have done significant damage to ourselves. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, [...]
Modernity is best apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the present. Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean [...]
For nearly fifty years, we have taught American children that the three greatest determinants in history are race, class, and gender. Virtue is scoffed at; “Great Men” are mocked; and free will is ignored. Should we be shocked—do we even have the right to be shocked—that our press, our culture, and our educators are obsessed [...]
I have read many of the volumes in my home, but there are many more I have yet to read and many which will remain unread when the soft sift in my hour glass is finally spent. And there are eighteen others I have not yet had time to write. Our home is awash [...]
One of our earliest examinations and appraisals of the Germanic peoples—those tall, blonde or red-haired, light-eyed barbarians to the North—comes from the Roman republican, Tacitus. Tacitus, to be sure, wrote with distinct bias. He wanted to show the Germans as natural republicans while implying that the Romans had lost their republican simplicity and manners [...]
I was a casual fan of his, but had always enjoyed his music. It seemed different from most other Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) that I had heard. It was somehow more real than the standard imitation-rock bands that were and are popular. It was often acoustic and had elements of Irish music, including the [...]
As I looked around that room in Washington, filled with so many powerful people, I realized that one day in Mother Teresa’s life brought more good to the face of the earth than all our efforts combined for a lifetime. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara [...]
The great fruit of C.S. Lewis’s clarity is that he shows his readers that the great truths are knowable through the application of pure and simple common sense. He makes the truth seem so obvious and so inescapable that we feel that we must always have known it, at least subconsciously. Some time ago, [...]
Will we have a recession in the next year or so? I don’t know. As an old joke has it—one that I’ve seen several times in the last week or so—many were those smart enough to have predicted seven of the last three recessions. My question, moral rather than strictly predictive, is whether we [...]