If we are indeed witnessing the nadir of American politics—or at least its accelerating decline—we should listen closely to Augustine. The “Augustine Option,” meaning a life lived in the final years of Rome, can offer key insights into how we should understand and address these tumultuous times. To the continued debate over whether religious Americans [...]
This Veterans Day, I would encourage you to remember and honor veterans, but less because what they have done, and more because of what their service represents—that is, a space for robust civil society, and human flourishing. Our nation has been at war now for more than a decade. Since the first troops were sent [...]
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
Tchaikovsky’s operas are remarkable for their passion, characters, and their pure, elevated humanity His music has the quality of touching something deep in one’s heart, revealing profound aspects of the human experience in a lofty and beautiful way that transcends time and barriers. Russian operas are not quite as well known as the operas of [...]
My heart breaks for Tolkien's Denethor, whose life ended unnecessarily, as bitterness, anger, and hopelessness in the face of evil consumed him. Let our prayer be that, even as we observe the darkness at the doorstep of Western Civilization, we imaginative conservatives stand at our posts and look to the Heavenly Father as our protector. [...]
To my mind, there never was a more serious teacher than Socrates. So let us imitate him to the best of our ability, and strive continually to improve our ability. I have written about Socrates as a model for imitating heroes, because he shows us how to use the lives of extraordinary people to help [...]
To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]
As we recall the legacy of the late Benedict XVI, we would be remiss if we overlooked his theology of the saints as the antidote to the “dictatorship of relativism." One of the central ideas throughout the writings of Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) has been the notion of communio (“communion”), which sees God Himself as [...]
The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]
William Gilmore Simms When it comes to stories that make your hair stand on end everyone’s mind understandably goes to master of macabre Edgar Allan Poe. But what did Poe himself consider the best ghost story? Of William Gilmore Simms’s short story “Grayling, or Murder Will Out,” Poe wrote “it is really an [...]
At the same time that writers were bringing depth of character to the gothic setting in the 19th century, Edgar Allan Poe revitalized the genre in mid-century America. Suddenly Tales of Horror had a distinctly American flair and a surprising psychological depth. This nuance captivated readers then and still does today. Two hundred and fifty [...]
For Russell Kirk, the "ghost tale" may better communicate certain truths when compared to science fiction. His was no Enlightenment mind, Kirk now became aware; it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. —Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination As J.R.R. Tolkien assisted many with his most informative essay, On Fairy Stories, [...]
The ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Russell Kirk to extend his own sense of awe-filled wonder to a wider audience. He was keenly aware of the need for romance and mystery in everyday life—and how hard it was to achieve it in America. He created for his readers one of those places in [...]
To assess accurately the state of Western Civilization, one needs to understand how the Western tradition, standing at the peak of its influence and popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, ended up in such a state of siege a century later. The reports of the death of Western Civilization are neither premature nor [...]