Is Time itself best understood by those things in life which are Time-less? Such is the main question posed in my play, “The Habsburg Manifesto.” It is not a political play but a philosophical one, whose main theme is the inner nobility of the individual as that which withstands and transcends all politics, all ideology, [...]
By affirming our human limitations, conservatism actually opens our minds to learning and discovering… Conservatives have always been portrayed as backward and unenlightened simpletons. This is true especially today because intellectual conservatives are being sidelined by identitarian and populist conservatism. This is not to excuse the Left. On the contrary, the Left’s insistence on presenting conservatives [...]
The dismantling of the idea of the West unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another. The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to [...]
Mass is not supposed to make me comfortable—it’s supposed to make me more holy… After thirty-five years as a liturgical musician, it’s amazing how little I really know about the liturgical music of the Roman Rite. Then again, what should I expect when my earliest memories of music at Mass tend to involve now-forgotten attempts to make [...]
The mystery is how one person whom I never met, through recountings down the ages of how many others whom I also have never met, could shed light on each other, eventually to enlighten me. In The Apology, Socrates brought up the question of whether he was paid for being a teacher, like the Sophists, who were paid [...]
"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a [...]
In their drive to provide abundance, mass markets suppress variety. Far from enriching a culture, mass markets can impoverish it… One of the benefits of modern mass markets is supposed to be the proliferation of choices. The modern consumer can choose from so many things available on a variety of platforms, be it off or [...]
The music of Michael Kurek is rooted in the past, and his own guiding philosophy is rooted in a love for the transcendent, triune splendor of the good, the true, and the beautiful, a love which is itself a fruit of his Christian faith. Michael Kurek As editor for the past sixteen years [...]
The beautiful sadness of the classical movement in architecture can be a message, urging all people of the third millennium to retrieve what was lost at the end of the second: the human need for transcendent meaning beyond history… What is the meaning of what we now generally refer to as the “New Classicism” or [...]
The primary purpose of the university is to preserve the great ideas of the past and to introduce the present generation to timeless conversations, thus preserving such wisdom for countless and unknown future generations… Conservatives rarely remember the profound influence Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996) had on the press, academia, and the public at large in [...]
The task of the conservative intellectual remains the same as it has always been, though acquiring new urgency. That task is to keep alive the wisdom that we are heir to and must keep and hand on… Carlyle defined history as ”the essence of innumerable biographies.” This is only one of the many inadequate but [...]
Too often the public conversation about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological lines. Russell Kirk’s great warning is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but a battle of sentiments or affections… Since the nation’s founding, a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths [...]
Looking at the whole of the South’s promise and achievement, I would be unwilling to say that it offers a foundation, or, because of some accidents of history, even an example. The most that it offers is a challenge… History is a liberal art and one profits by studying the whole of it, including the [...]
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser [...]