The classic television show "Columbo," like the great novel "Crime and Punishment," is a classic, and rightfully so, because it too penetrates to the heart of a modern heresy and exposes it for the lie that it is. This is the Nietzschean idea of the "ubermensch": the superman who can transcend ordinary law. Selecting a [...]
The problem of authority is not merely a political problem or even simply a problem of faith. It instead requires a gathering up of the whole of life, indeed the world in all of its rich multitude of aspects, in relation to its meaning-granting center. Anxious about trends he was witnessing in the ’60s and [...]
I contend that the Middle Ages were neither religious nor secular because the religious and the secular are two features of a single construction: the modern, Western social architecture of “Church” and “State,” “private” and “public.” The societies of the Middle Ages had a different architecture based on different assumptions and different concepts, ultimately on [...]
We need a return to Christian order and freedom, with God at its center. Only then will society no longer appear broken, and things will work properly. A general sense that society is broken prevails in America today. Polls show that people are not satisfied with the direction the nation is going. Things and institutions [...]
The great thing about life is that any man can be good, and honest, and ethical, and moral, and can have character. We are not animals to be degraded at every moment. We know that we’re made for the stars, created for eternity, born for the everlasting, and we stand by it. We must improve [...]
While the rule of law is an essential public good, the actual number and extent of laws also are important factors in determining whether there will be liberty—and, indeed, the rule of law itself. Moreover, as too much law undermines freedom and its own proper character, it also tears apart the very fabric of the [...]
Unlike most European languages, in which there is a formal and an informal mode of addressing someone else, the English word “you” lacks this distinction and the tremendous psychological barrier that accompanies it, and was thus crucial to promoting political democracy and social democracy. There are many, many things that strongly affect a person or [...]
As the coronavirus lockdowns stretch into months, the apparent success of the remote-work experiment is fraying at the edges. Lack of personal contact has worsened the situation of an already polarized and fragmented society, and the idea that everything can be made virtual has been proven a myth. As the lockdowns swept the nation, governments [...]
Consider what else the radicals and rioters have accomplished. They have made mass civil disobedience an acceptable and even praiseworthy form of protest, if you are justifiably outraged. They have won near-immunity for burning and looting stores. Blanket amnesties at the state and city level appear to be in the cards. The Seattle Commune is [...]
We erect statues to remember, revere, and honor those whom we memorialize. And what is the motivation of the people who tear them down and desecrate them? In a word, it is hate. But hating history and denying history and tearing down the statues of the men who made that history does not change history. [...]
As it rises in prominence, the issue of defunding police will divide the Democratic Party more than the GOP. For while the hard left sees cops in ideological and class terms as racist and fascist, the right, by and large, sees the police as the last line of defense against the anarchy we saw erupt [...]
It seems as if the cycle of Resentment and Revenge is so fundamental to human nature that it cannot be cured by humanistic solutions—but could it be countered by the theological virtues? What’s wrong with the world? Chesterton famously said, “I am, yours sincerely G.K. Chesterton.” However, two thinkers can help us understand the chaotic [...]
The storytelling of a tribe gives each member a common remote past, communal heroes to emulate, shared social rules, and an answer to “Who am I?” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s College, Annapolis, in the year of her 90th birthday. The [...]
By the beginning of the Mexican war, even famed newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan began to doubt his own expansionist infatuations. What would America do, for example, if she tried to incorporate not just Mexico but actual, honest-to-God Mexicans into the republic? Standing with his father as they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in [...]