We Americans like to think of ourselves as anti-monarchical; most of us on the Right are self-styled small-r republicans, while Leftists think of themselves as small-d democrats. In addition, we all, Right and Left, fancy that what unites Americans is devotion to a set of ideas to which we all adhere, and which are best [...]
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now [...]
By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. In America and [...]
It is unclear which was lost first, the cosmos or God. With hindsight it appears they came as a package, lose one and you lose the other. People still speak of the cosmos, but they either do not know what they are talking about or they mean something very different than what people used to [...]
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 [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” is as sincere a conversion poem as one can have it: No fancy light shining down from the heavens or a thunderous call to holiness; just one small event that left a Magus perplexed by a new worldview that was unsettling and strange, for it put into question [...]
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas two of my great loves sent to me a couple of great meditations on the mystery of the Nativity. The first and better-known meditation is by T.S. Eliot, whose “Journey of the Magi” places the poet in the entourage of the Three Wise Men as they journey to Bethlehem. [...]
You see, the poet haunts, casting a spell on the reader or listener. The power of the word in poetic form is nearly incomprehensible. Especially when paired with melody, the effect is extraordinary. This means that a songwriter, a hundred years down the road, having read only small, peripheral portions of his poetry, and having [...]
What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway's biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, [...]
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 [...]
If it sounds like an Indiana Jones movie recast with the Sage of Mecosta, you’re not so wrong. It’s a real mystery involving real medieval Crusaders; it’s full of action and adventure, it co-stars the Father of Modern American Conservatism, and it may help to explain the Bohemian Tory’s famous wanderlust, imagination and romance. Chuck [...]
The faith of our students has a Spartan or Roman openness to it, something Magian, that deeply respects the full reality of things. They understand that our deepest analogy to God is submission to the truth, but they know from this education that seeing the truth of God’s will in crucial decisions might require patience [...]
Both Pyotr Tchaikovsky (in 1840) and Johannes Brahms (in 1833) were born on May 7. That little coincidence didn’t help endear Brahms or his music to Tchaikovsky, however, as the Russian called the German “a conceited mediocrity” and “a giftless bastard.” But then one New Year’s Day, the two men met at a dinner and [...]