Two great works of republican literature, though separated by almost exactly a century, give us an important insight into the republican mind. The first, Joseph Addison’s play “Cato,” found a receptive and devoted audience among American founders such as George Washington, Nathan Hale, and Patrick Henry. During his famous and well-attended University of Pennsylvania lectures [...]
So, is it the End? Possibly. Christians have been worried about the End since the days that Christ walked the earth. Could it happen three minutes after you have read this? Maybe. Could it happen three thousand years after you read this? Just as likely. Toward the end of the twentieth century, closing two thousand [...]
Americans historically have not just believed in the “right” to bear arms, but they have, more importantly, claimed an actual republican duty of all Americans to bear arms. Every two years at Hillsdale College, I have the immense privilege of teaching three of our upper-level U.S. survey courses: American Founding (1753-1806); Democratic America (1807-1848); and [...]
Poland’s reforms and constitution, Edmund Burke thought, offered real meaning, much closer to the experience of the American Revolution than that of the French Revolution. In significant ways, the Polish king succeeded because he embraced the laws of nature and “the array of Justice” without forcing anything of his own will upon his people. Stanislaw [...]
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a "cultural Protestant." As such, he "applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come." Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien connected me to a world beyond anything I had yet experienced in rather idyllic Kansas. I so desperately wanted to escape into his mountain scene, explore every nook and cranny of that invented world, and meet a God who sang the universe into existence. Though I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of [...]
I became a Catholic—after seven years of teenage atheism—because of the lyrics of the album, "The Colour of Spring," by the English band Talk Talk. I didn’t know Mark Hollis, the writer of those lyrics, and I don’t claim that he actually practiced what he preached. But preached he did! First, I should really cool [...]
The two principal writers (Jefferson the author and Adams the orator) of the Declaration died on its fiftieth anniversary. This has become a sort of cute, trivial point to us two hundred years later. But to the Americans of the day, it was astounding, surely confirmation that God smiled upon the Declaration and upon America. [...]
C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity” is a model work in the muddled and subjective world of ideologies, state-led terrorisms, gulags, holocausts, and killing fields. Sprinkled with timeless wisdom and profound insights, it is about fundamental aspects of Christianity and seeks to go beyond denominational differences without creating yet another new denomination. After C.S. Lewis converted to [...]
As shocking as it might seem to those who knew Russell Kirk as a bad (in terms of practice) Catholic, he deserves sainthood. Here is my case for Saint Russell of Mecosta. When I first started reading the works of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in the fall of 1989, that most joyously fateful of seasons, [...]
The novel "Salem’s Lot" proves that Stephen King is both a first-rate storyteller and a top-notch writer, who is especially good when describing the imagination of a child and the child’s ability to see things the adult no longer can. But is it a great work of horror? On November 17, 1979, two months after [...]
Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is one of America’s foremost and most important thinkers, especially in the desiccated and mutilated 20th century, an era of horrific inhumanities and incessant blood-letting. Kirk stood for a more humane age that valued the dignity and uniqueness of each human person and that unabashedly sought the good, the true, and [...]
Christopher Columbus is without a doubt responsible for the Columbian Exchange—which through human agency recreated the lost world of Pangea. But was Columbus the first to discover America? The memory—and especially the statues—of Christopher Columbus have taken quite the beating over the last half-century. The great Lakota activist, Russell Means, once called him worse than [...]
Christopher Dawson set himself the task of surveying the history of Western Civilization in the light of a master-idea: that religion is the dynamic force, the basic constituent and the inspiration of all higher human activity, and that therefore the culture of an era depends upon its religion. Looking back over the vast ruins and [...]