Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his [...]
Jon Lauck's "The Good Country" is an extraordinary book, a celebration of the good, the true, and the beautiful as well as a revelation of the deepest flaws in American history. One comes away from reading it with immense energy to follow its creatively conservative paths. The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, [...]
By the late 1960s, Ray Bradbury had channeled most of his creative energy away from his fiction and into his promotion of American space exploration and into his often-frustrated Hollywood dreams. When delving into fiction, he would return time and again to the safe harbors of his early successes. Jonathan R. Eller, Bradbury Beyond Apollo [...]
As America and Russia continued to progress into space, Ray Bradbury saw the efforts as a new phase in man’s spiritual consciousness. God, Bradbury declared, wanted man to approach the universe. The encounter with space was a “Cry of the Cosmos.” As such, science fiction as a genre was entering not just respectability, but the [...]
The Medieval Church culturally unified Christendom through a common language, Latin, and a common liturgy, tying men together with other men of their own time, but also with the whole communion of saints. Petrarch, ca. 1350, first employed the term “Medieval” to argue that his time (ca. 1350) had advanced beyond the so-called “dark ages.” [...]
In the first volume of his three-volume biography, "Becoming Ray Bradbury," Jonathan R. Eller draws upon his friendship with Bradbury as well as upon a myriad of primary sources to write one of the best biographies of the famous author that I’ve yet encountered. Becoming Ray Bradbury, by Jonathan R. Eller (360 pages, University of [...]
Historical consciousness and the attendant self-knowledge show what man has become, what he has made of himself, not only through his deeds but also, and more importantly, through the contemplation of what he has been. Together these insights potentially constitute the foundation of a new humanism, encouraging us to turn backward and inward rather than [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” a monumental work—the Purgatorio between the Inferno of “The Waste-land” and the Paradiso of the “Four Quartets”—has always been, as long as I can remember in my adult life, a comfort and a mystery to me. I assume it remained as such even to the Great Bard of the Twentieth Century himself. [...]
The American frontier has served for centuries as a mythic stage as well as the perfect mirror, offering up a reflection—for good and for ill—of who and what we have been since the arrival of Columbus in 1492. One of my all-time favorite scholars, Don Lutz, had this to say about the symbols that form [...]
In our world of recriminating hatreds—in which we desire more to label those we don’t like as sexist, imperialist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and, simultaneously, mark ourselves as victims—we often forget some important historical truths. Here’s one we conveniently ignore, dismiss, or mock: Nothing in the world has brought about more equality and justice than has [...]
Perhaps more than any other figure in the early history of the American Republic, John Marshall shaped the Supreme Court as well as attitudes toward and understandings of the U.S. Constitution. John Marshall (September 24, 1755–July 6, 1835) was the fourth man to serve as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, following [...]
From the late 1660s until about 1763, slavery grew dramatically in the American colonies, but especially in the southern colonies. Then, between 1763 and 1793, the institution declined precipitously. Why? As an institution, slavery has one of the strangest of all histories. Though Africans were sold on American soil as early as 1619, chattel slavery [...]
One of the most frustrating things about the Civil War is simply trying to understand its many causes. As long as historians exist, there will be a multitudinous cacophony of answers to this perplexing question. I’ve been wrestling with these questions for nearly a quarter of a century. Let me offer several causes. I’ve had [...]
Edmund Burke believed that one must see the human being not for what he is, or the worst that is within him, but rather as clothed in the “wardrobe of moral imagination,” a glimpse of what the person could be and is, by God, meant to be. Though we correctly remember Edmund Burke as the [...]