James Como’s C.S Lewis: A Very Short Introduction is delightful and is the single finest biographical survey yet written on the Oxford don. In a little more than one hundred pages, you’ll happily come to know the complexities of the most famous convert to Christianity in the twentieth century. C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction, by [...]
In a world that demands and encourages immediate reaction and instantaneous anger, serious writing allows us to turn toward the good, the true, and the beautiful in a meaningful manner, a manner worthy of our ancestors and of our children and grandchildren. I’ve had the compulsion (yes, the correct word, I think) to write as [...]
Growing up in a small but well-to-do Kansas town, I had access to several local bookshops—used and new—in grade school. Every bookstore offered joys, mysteries, and delights. Rarely have I walked into one and not found some kind of treasure. A few weeks ago, while lecturing for a Hillsdale College event in Boise, Idaho, I [...]
Few things in life have given me as much pleasure as writing has. I’ve never been what anyone would describe as “low-energy,” but I’ve also not always been exactly sure how to release my own energies, especially when it came to writing. I’ve also always possessed the creative impulse, but that impulse was frustrated time [...]
On February 25, 2019, at age sixty-four, Mark David Hollis passed away. Though he had not been active for more than two decades in the music industry, his death is a great loss to the art world. Hollis was the “J.D. Salinger of the rock world” but, frankly, much cooler and much more talented. He [...]
I loved every moment of the process of research—from the initial stages of utter bewilderment to the compilation of data to imagining and completing the final form of the paper. I knew what I loved, and I knew what I wanted to do with my life. In some way or shape or form, I wanted [...]
I first came across Russell Kirk’s belief that academics must serve as guardians of “the Word” in his groundbreaking but now sadly-neglected book, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (1955). “The principle support to academic freedom, in the classical world, the medieval world, and the American educational tradition, has been the conviction, among scholars and teachers, [...]
Not only is the art of making a book sacred, but, when done well, the words within those books are sacred as well. After all, Christ came as the Word, and words, when properly understood, reflect His eternal glory and dignity, even if confined to ink on a page… From the moment I read my [...]
Christopher Dawson believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will, and thus was “moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel”… As noted in previous essays in this series, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the greatest of the [...]
An understanding of progress and its adherents was not just of academic curiosity to Christopher Dawson. It was central to understanding the good life and preventing those who misunderstood history from gaining control and imposing the will of man upon the creation of God… “What has happened will happen again, and what has been done [...]
Despite all Christopher Dawson’s quirks and social fears, friends flocked to him; together, they read poetry, discussed philosophy, farmed, and made crafts. Would there have been a European renaissance of Christian Humanism without this friendship centered around “Tiger Dawson”? Almost certainly not… Though he might very well have been the most important Christian Humanist intellectual of [...]
As we begin the 19th year of the 21st century, we no longer have the right to pretend the century is young—to believe that we cannot judge it in the way we can judge any previous century. More than a fifth over, the century demands analysis and criticism. What would we write or say or [...]
One of the things that I have, blessedly, never taken for granted is how many astounding intellects, diverse personalities, and creative persons I’ve encountered in my life. I don’t know what I did to deserve such interactions, but I’m both humbled and inspired by it all. As I’ve had the chance to note several times, [...]
No government has ever made itself permanently wealthy through the plunder of its people—which destroys not just the productive capacity of a country but also its moral foundations. Though a classic in its own right, and arguably the first book on conservatism in the modern world, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 is [...]