The truth is not simply that all that is good, true and beautiful comes from heaven but that all goodness, truth and beauty points to heaven. We see heaven in the light of the heavenly overspill in which we find ourselves. They came to the top of a little ridge with fine views over the [...]
Tales and stories are an elementary wonder because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. Wonder and astonishment can prepare our minds and hearts to receive truth just as soil receives seed; one such truth-bearer is Lois Lowry’s “Gathering Blue.” According to G.K. Chesterton, tales and stories are an elementary wonder because they [...]
How does one find the obstinacy, the calm, the strength to glow with the Beautiful and the True in the midst of a raging storm? I think about a small argument in chapter 13 of the “Summa Contra Gentiles,” the work which, when my heart slows its hammering, gives my mind peace. I am at [...]
Let us make no mistake. The primary front in our battle in America today lies in our minds, and the most vulnerable minds are those of our children. We can take a stand. Our children can. They will take a stand, but only if we have the calm wisdom of those whose statues are being [...]
Today we hear well-meaning appeals for civility, bipartisanship, compromise, dialogue, and common ground. Admirable aspirations, these. But there is a proper order that is often lost in our civic workshops: The search for truth must begin before the quest for common ground. On a recent summer evening, a friend entertained several of us with nothing [...]
In the First Letter to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:9-10), Saint Paul informs us (RSV CE 2nd ed.) “The law is not laid down for the righteous but for… immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine”. Stern words indeed. In the Vulgate, what the RSV renders “kidnappers” is plagis, [...]
Christian schools must not follow their secular counterparts in their educational approach. They must surround their students with the noble, the beautiful, and the true in all areas of the curriculum and the academic environment, encouraging them to become like what they see. In the cultural wasteland of the ’70s, where peace and love had [...]
If schools truly seek to form students capable of philosophical inquiry, they must recover the ancient understanding of "arithmetike" as a pathway to truth. Only then will mathematics resume its rightful place among the liberal arts, serving not as a practical tool but as a means of intellectual and spiritual formation. Walk into any elementary mathematics [...]
Conservatism seeks the Truth that has emerged over time, drawing from the deep wellsprings of human experience, and builds anew on foundations that have withstood the tests of time. It fosters order and the flourishing of human beings as they live in relationship with one another. We are united in the eternal contract between the [...]
On grace depends our salvation, but we have neither a right to grace nor the power to compel it. Grace must reveal itself to us, and only then will we recognize it. Through your creation, O Lord, goes a voice that reminds us of something that is above everything created. The things and their ordering, [...]
For all those out there wondering, including my first-grade art teacher who never learned how to pronounce it, my surname is actually pronounced with a long rather than short “e.” It’s “DEE-vuhl” and not “Devil.” But the moniker of a demon has been applied to me so often that I have decided to make demon-ade. [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
Now we’ve always been a happiness oriented culture. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and so forth. Right? But it’s taken a particularly interesting turn: the topic of “meaning” and “meaning in life” is coming to the fore. People, more and more, are talking about not just sheer contentedness, but what it is for [...]
It makes no sense to reward someone who frustrates the purposes of literature with a major prize. Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai. There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out [...]