Edmund Burke was the nexus among the classical, medieval, and modern worlds, and the best answer to contemporary ideology. It is worth considering the Burke of Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Russell Kirk in order to fully understand his importance to the rise of conservatism in academia after World War II. The somewhat radical (relatively [...]
Despite almost continuous employment of the term “Christian Humanist” over the past few centuries, many still scratch their heads (individually and collectively) when encountering the noble ideal. To put it simply, three tenets define Christian humanism. […]
Despite the secularist’s attempts to lay claim to the word “humanism,” there’s nothing intrinsically secular about it. Using “humanism” as if it were in opposition to “theism” is to create a false dichotomy. Bradley Birzer’s “Beyond Tenebrae” serves to clearly illustrate that good theists can be good humanists—and are sometimes the best. Beyond Tenebrae: Christian [...]
In so many ways, the American founding era (1761-1793) is a time period without equal in all modern history, as a dedicated group of citizens attempted to create and sustain the first republic on any large scale since the collapse of the Roman Republic with the assassination of Senator Marcus T. Cicero (43B.C.). They did [...]
In almost every way, Sir Roger Scruton was a thorn in the side of modernity and post-modernity. With Burke, he fought a “forlorn but dignified resistance to the tides of history.” He sought a future in which the national loyalty would endure, holding things together, providing all of us with sources of hope. No one [...]
On Tuesday, January 7, 2020, Neil Ellwood Peart valiantly lost his three and half-year battle against brain cancer. On that same day, he entered Valhalla, escorted by at least one Valkyrie, but quite possibly by two or three. Peart has shaped many of us very quietly and sometimes not so quietly. I can state with [...]
After his father’s death, Christopher Tolkien became the literary heir of all things Middle-earth. He quit his prestigious academic professorship at Oxford and dedicated himself fully to his father’s legacy. We are a better people and a better civilization as a result. On Wednesday, January 15, 2020, the holy host of the Valar (all 14 [...]
“Man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfection.”—T.E. Hulme The mediocrity and driftless purposelessness of liberalism had permeated and shattered true humanist culture at the turn of the nineteenth-to-the-twentieth century, the great historian and man of letters Christopher Dawson feared. Too many unthinking liberals had tried to do [...]
“Red Metal” fully understands that we live in a post-Communist world, a world of fundamentalisms as well as of nation-states and tenuous alliances. I highly recommend the novel, not only for its entertainment value, but also for its ability to ask all the right questions we Americans need to be asking. Red Metal, by Mark [...]
Paul Elmer More offered one of the single best critiques of Friedrich Nietzsche, delving deeply into the essence of his thought, in both attraction and repulsion, finding that it is in the attempt to reconcile the love and apprehension about Nietzsche that best allows one to understand him. “Who has ever been concerned for me [...]
Death is a truly strange thing. It has touched each of us, to be sure, by visiting loved ones. Yet, sometimes, it seems just unbelievably relentless. Death has already taken so many greats in the first half of January 2020—Neil Peart on January 7; Sir Roger Scruton on January 12; and Christopher Tolkien on January [...]
If, as established in my two previous two essays*, the Logos has its roots in ancient pagan as well as ancient Hebraic thought, what does this mean for Christianity and its adoption of the term? Clearly, the most blatant manifestations of the Greco-Hebraic concept of the Logos—the eternal Word, the unending fire, thought, and imagination—appear [...]
Though originally a Jew, St. John was clearly a Hellenized Jew who might have taken his own concepts from either the pagans or the Jews. As he describes the Incarnate Word in his Gospel, the Incarnation resembles most closely the Memra of the Jews. As I discussed in my previous essay, the Pagan Logos had [...]
Any understanding of human dignity in the twenty-first century demands an understanding of the Judeo-Christian Logos (Memra in Hebrew). Without it, there is only chaos and darkness, dispiritedness and confusion, blackness and the abyss. One only has to witness the evil sown by the attempted coup against the Judeo-Christian Logos in the last century by [...]