“A book is a word spoken into creation. Its message goes out into the world. It cannot be taken back,” Michael O’Brien warned as well as assured in his magisterial novel, Sophia House. Just as each word is a reflection of The Word (Logos), so each book is a reflection of The Book. While Christians [...]
O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace, That thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face. –John Donne, from “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” What is the Christian to do when faced with secular thought that speaks truth [...]
Euthanasia and physician-assisted death is a topic much in the news these days. After the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent ruling, the Canadian government is busy with legislation overseeing such practices. Perhaps the viewpoint of an ancient school of philosophical thought, Stoicism, may aid contemporary reflections on the matter of physician-assisted suicide, especially since such [...]
The film “Gladiator” imparts a feeling of what living according to Stoic virtue might be. One of the best Stoic lines of dialogue in the film is given to Maximus, who says: “I knew a man who once said, ‘Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.’” In Ridley Scott’s [...]
Irving Babbitt embraced the inherent Stoic qualities not only of the ancient Western world but also of high, ancient Asian culture as well. One of Western Civilization’s greatest defenders in the twentieth century, Harvard University’s Irving Babbitt, founder of the New Humanism, best friend to Paul Elmer More, and the teacher of T.S. Eliot, considered [...]
From the Christian perspective, the Logos is the beginning, the middle, and the end of time and history, and history itself is a reflection of the Logos. Each person—from Adam to the last person—is a finite reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Image of God, an incarnate soul. In the stunningly poetic prologue [...]
A review of Lord Percy of Newcastle’s, The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government (London, 1954). In 1957, Kirk published a list of “must-read” books to understand modern (meaning, as it had developed or been rediscovered in the 1950s) conservatism. His list would not surprise most readers of The Imaginative Conservative, [...]
Stoicism did not serve as mere speculation for the Hellenistic Greeks; it revealed the path to a virtuous life. And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, [...]