For Christopher Dawson, there was the inflection point, the point of intersection where the enfleshment of God took place to fire the historical imagination. There could be no other event, no possible happening in the great sea of history to compare with the coming of God among us, pitching His tent in the midst of our [...]
Please never forget, we Catholics have a great legacy. We’ve been promoting liberal education since the days of St. Paul. Some of our greatest saints were liberally educated, and promoting all that is good and true and beautiful has been one of our greatest causes. The author recently delivered the address below to the Roman [...]
It took Edmund Burke a very little time to decide that French Revolutionary philosophy posed a massive threat to civilization and social stability throughout Europe. By the end of his life, eight years after the storming of the Bastille, his fears of Jacobin contagion had led him to ask for a secret grave, removed from [...]
If the people who profess belief in God were to actually live with intentionality—in their business decisions, in their classrooms, in their television broadcasts and movie scripts, in their community organizations, and in their art—together we would transform the culture. One advantage I have in this conversation is that the Elliott household continues the discussion [...]
John Rocha with Winston & Barbara Elliott On Saturday evening, I went to sleep reflecting on a text I had received from Winston Elliott about the film The Emperor’s Club. On Sunday morning, as I awoke—still a little groggy from Daylight Saving Time—I saw another text from him saying that his beloved bride, [...]
Catholic culture is, first and foremost, a society built upon a family whose identity draws from the Holy Family. In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, [...]
In “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot repudiated his ironic style along with his despairing and nihilistic view of the world. When he wrote it, he was turning from the hell of the wasteland of unbelief to receive his ashes and begin his long Lent. T.S. Eliot’s secret baptism in 1927 marked one of the most remarkable [...]
Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual [...]
Do you wish to understand the birth of right and left? Examine the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin, (304 pages, Basic Books, 2014) Those seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of contemporary [...]
Christopher Dawson greatly admired John Henry Newman, for he understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries the coming war of the Church against the ideologues bred by the French Revolution, utilitarianism, and secularization. As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the [...]
Edmund Burke contended that, far from creating peace, the French Revolution had generated the greatest despotism the world had yet seen, politicizing all things and enslaving the vast majority of the population. Of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) four Letters on a Regicide Peace—his final work, written while he rested on his deathbed—the fourth is, by far, [...]
The modern political conflict goes much deeper than the old party struggle. It has become a battle of ideas and beliefs. Practical politics are not enough. We need a Conservative sociology to set against the Socialist theory of society, and a spiritual ideal of Conservative order to meet the idealism of revolution. Introduction and Notes by [...]
We modern defenders of the liberal arts have to choose between Socrates’ vision and Cicero’s vision: Are we citizens of a particular soil and a particular place, or are we connected—across time and space—to all good men and God? A few weeks ago, I had the grand privilege of attending a Liberty Fund conference on [...]
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and [...]