The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen”

By |2024-02-12T19:27:56-06:00February 12th, 2024|Categories: Love, Marriage, Music, Paul Krause, Richard Wagner, Timeless Essays|

Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]

The Incarnation of Truth and Love

By |2023-12-24T23:27:09-06:00December 24th, 2023|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christmas, Love, Paul Krause, Reason, Senior Contributors, Theology, Timeless Essays|

The real claim of Christmas, for Christians, is that Truth and Love penetrated the cosmos. Christmas is a warm, loving, and tender season precisely for this reason. That warm fire, or bright sky, or joyful company, is made possible only because that God which ever lives and loves—to which the whole creation moves—entered the creation [...]

Memory, Love, & Eternity in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”

By |2023-10-05T19:13:46-05:00October 5th, 2023|Categories: Alfred Tennyson, Imagination, Literature, Love, Paul Krause, Poetry, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” wrestles with the death of the poet’s closest friend, a death that pushed Tennyson into a bout of depression and an immense wallowing sorrow. But the poem is also an attempt to draw near the transformative power of love—a love that turns the cold and bleak midwinter into the high noon of [...]

Augustine’s “City of God”: The First Culture War

By |2023-08-27T13:19:28-05:00August 27th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Civil Society, Culture War, Love, Paul Krause, Rome, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for today. In contrast to the city of man, the City of Love, Augustine argues, is the godly city to which Christians belong and [...]

Baseball and the Cure of Souls

By |2023-03-29T18:50:43-05:00March 29th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Culture, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Sports, Timeless Essays|

Baseball has an essence that mirrors the heavenly city and the precision of creation better than other sports. Its calmer nature also embodies that sense of tranquility which the restless heart seeks. The baseball season has arrived. America’s pastime sport returns, like Persephone from her bondage in Hades, to signal the return to life that [...]

In the Ruins of Babylon: The Poetic “Genius” of John Keats

By |2023-03-06T17:15:40-06:00March 6th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Love, Paul Krause, Poetry, Religion, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

The poetry of John Keats is a window into the mad genius of the Romantics: their lusts and hopes; their ambitions and ignorance; their radicalism and fantasies. In reading Keats, one is simultaneously scandalized and sympathetic to the longing of the Romantic heart. “The best things we have come from madness.” John Keats died only [...]

Eating Alone: Aristotle & the Culture of the Meal

By |2023-02-26T17:46:43-06:00February 26th, 2023|Categories: Aristotle, Christian Living, Civilization, Family, Friendship, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Eating together, as a social event, is meant to be time-consuming because it is meant to be an intimate experience where friendship—true friendship—is experienced, rekindled, and love stands at the center of the dinner table. It is, in its own way, a call to sacrifice. Aristotle identified man’s eating habits as one of the cornerstones of civilization—one [...]

Metamorphosis by Love

By |2023-03-24T10:03:38-05:00February 13th, 2023|Categories: Great Books, Imagination, Literature, Love, Myth, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is many things: several stories, some bleak, some uplifting, ranging from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Yet in its most fundamental form, his epic love poem of many stories reveals deep truths in its poetic proclamations of the transformative power, and spirit, of love. Ovid was one [...]

The Enchanted Cosmos With Thomas Aquinas

By |2024-01-28T08:05:50-06:00January 27th, 2022|Categories: Education, Paul Krause, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, St. Thomas Aquinas, Timeless Essays|

Thomas Aquinas’ cosmology and doctrine of the soul are vitalistic. Everything has a particular soul to it, and these souls have particular life-forces destined for particular ends. As a whole, the cosmos is meant to reflect and embody the graces of God: his beauty, love, and goodness. Such is to what all things are ultimately [...]

Antigone Agonistes

By |2021-11-02T14:06:03-05:00November 2nd, 2021|Categories: Antigone, Paul Krause, Sophocles|

It is undoubtedly true that our first and primary loyalty is the love due to family rather than the state. Even if it brings death, the choice of love rather than power is the most heroic thing a human can choose. Aristotle in the Poetics defined the heart of tragedy as the imitation of admirable [...]

Decadence, Love, & Lust: Understanding the “Star Wars” Prequels

By |2021-05-03T16:25:25-05:00May 3rd, 2021|Categories: Civilization, Culture, Film, Love, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors|

The original “Star Wars” trilogy explored the crises of identity, love, and redemption in the midst of a technologically tyrannical world. The prequel trilogy, by contrast, is primarily concerned with themes of decadence, corporate domination, political corruption, and the insidious influence that these forces have on love. Star Wars is one of most successful film [...]

The Pilgrim’s Calling: John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”

By |2021-04-06T14:41:56-05:00April 6th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Literature, Paul Krause, Protestant Reformation, Senior Contributors|

John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” contains a shift away from institutional idealism and toward a separationist theology that revived the Theology of Calling. It is perhaps the finest work of English nonconformist literature since John Milton and remains unsurpassed more than three centuries later. Next to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, there is no greater representative [...]

Innocence Lost: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Literature

By |2021-03-02T00:45:37-06:00March 2nd, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Conservatism, Great Books, Herman Melville, Liberalism, Literature, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors|

In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection. It is true that the classics, especially Virgil and Cicero, along [...]

Euripides: Poet-Prophet of Pity

By |2021-02-03T16:32:16-06:00February 3rd, 2021|Categories: Death, Great Books, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Theater, War|

Responding to the great bloodshed of young men, women, and virgins he experienced during the Peloponnesian War, Euripides exposes the horrors of war and its damaging effects on humans, particularly on women, in his war plays. Euripides’s dramatic tragedies appeal to our sense of pity and call for peace. The acme of Euripides’s literary genius [...]

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