The final word on the legacy of John Fisher and Thomas More, and the final judgment (under God) on why we should see them as heroes, is given by G. K. Chesterton, a man who proves in his very self that the killing of More and Fisher did not kill learning, laughter or holiness: "There [...]
In “Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor,” Richard R. Beeman tells a compelling narrative of the crucial years between the first meeting of the Continental Congress and the announcement of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. He gives concrete examples of the novel ways in which the lines of political and legal [...]
The need for understanding our roots is as timeless as the human story itself and explains why we cling to the Declaration of Independence. Most people know that the Fourth of July—Independence Day—is a celebration of America’s separation from Great Britain. July 4, 1776 marks the beginning of the United States. It’s like our national birthday. [...]
As we celebrate the documents produced by the generation that also gave us Paul Revere, let us remember that they knew something that we have largely forgotten: the richness of community life that lay behind those documents, and without which they would never have been written. We celebrate this weekend a common declaration of independence, [...]
The Roman Empire was unique because it espoused the principle of moderation in politics. This is what permitted the unique dynamism of a uniquely changing but uniquely enduring political form: from city, to empire, to nation. And that dynamism may still propel us today as a principle of rebirth, if only we recapture its essence. [...]
William F. Buckley did not resist the ideas of collectivism as successfully as he thought. Instead, he chose to aim for winning a contemporary battle rather than defending the Permanent Things. Conservatives today would do well to guard against falling into the same trap. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale is one of [...]
The reconstructed Globe theater is a masterpiece, a beautiful dream-come-true and a wonderful contribution to the universal Shakespeare industry. If only the productions of the Bard’s plays were as authentic as the theater in which they are performed, instead of being the puerile pastiches that their producers foist upon us. It was a glorious June [...]
The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. Both these ills can be, in part, cured by liberal education. In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should [...]
Conservatives are people who defend certain traditional goods, because they know they’re worth defending. Political philosophy, by contrast, is animated by concerns quite different from political battles or external goods. It’s fundamentally a quest for insight, not influence. Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss were essentially philosophers, not conservatives. For more than fifty years, American conservatives [...]
Mary's example of humility guides us in strange times like ours, when the ancient sins have lost their shame. This month’s Wyoming School of Catholic Thought (June 12-17) took on a topic of universal importance: mortality and eternity. Our participants, who were deeply engaged in the week-long conversation, repeatedly wrestled with the primordial relation between [...]
Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity—not from a desire to inculcate “cultural literacy,” or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of human sensibility. What is needed is to recapture [...]
The Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker [...]
The Catholic Church canonized Saints Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935, only two years after the appearance of "The English Way," a work edited by one of the most important Christian humanists and publishers of the twentieth century, Maisie Ward, and which looks at the lives, ideas, and deaths of the great Roman Catholic [...]
If we fail to inspire this next generation to pursue that which is True, Good, and Beautiful, I shudder to think at the consequences. Groupthink will destroy all that we hold dear. We want our students to polish their reason and to prepare to guide and navigate their chariots along the track of life. It [...]