Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
Both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, and they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish. The 1930s were a period of intellectual and cultural ferment that have much to tell us about [...]
Only by recognizing the divine mystery that predicates existence in the world can one reclaim his individuality. Only then will he be capable of searching for meaning generated outside the human intellect. Humans can never be gods, but they need God to live meaningful lives. Most students I teach believe that reality is subjective and [...]
Do you believe in a higher power, something that transcends the “human organism”? If this question is trivialized or ignored, we enter the very sound and soul of despair. Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings. Philosophy, literally translated, is the love of wisdom. Philosophical anthropology, then, is the scientific study of humans for [...]
In a world and at a time when men have discarded the idea of intellectual truth, it is through the soul and in the imagination that they can, and must, be reached. In a recent address to the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Cardinal Raymond Burke called for a return to Summorum Pontificum and greater access [...]
The American people have endured a dark age. But today they are choosing courage over comfort. Order over anarchy. Truth over technocracy. And in doing so, they are giving birth to a new moment: A chance to rebuild a republic where men are strong, women are cherished, children are protected, and God is honored. We [...]
Pope St. John Paul II and Russell Kirk defended freedom within the limits of truth and its authentic or right use. They knew it was crucial to distinguish license and liberty. But they have different approaches to truth. As we discussed the work of Russell Kirk, written in 1954, revised in 1962 and 1988, I [...]
Did Archbishop Fulton Sheen prophesy about these times? In a talk 76 years ago, Bishop Fulton Sheen appeared as visionary as prophets of old. “We are at the end of Christendom.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen said during a talk in 1947. Making clear he didn’t mean Christianity or the Church, he said, “Christendom is economic, political, [...]
One of my mentors in becoming a Christian was, at one point, barely able to feed his family because of a degenerative back condition, which prevented him from working and which would normally have led to paralysis. Because of this, his family was very poor and lived without many amenities the rest of us are [...]
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 [...]
Although Pythagorean mathematics bears little resemblance to what we find in today’s textbooks, its foundation was laid by ancient lovers of wisdom. By rediscovering its original significance, mathematics might guide our minds not toward engineering aimed at mastering nature, but toward contemplation, preparing us for deeper contact with the realm of spirit and its magnificent, [...]
Our search for truth in this earthly life is not a march to the grave, but a journey of progressive illumination, in which each day brings the promise of some new wonder, some fresh joy. “Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will [...]
The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. —Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” These famous lines of Keats [...]
Our cultural confusions, especially among the educated, reveal a language desperately in need of repair, a reality in need of rediscovery. Differences in rank, in particular, were obvious until the dawn of modern scientism, the political ideology of technocratic materialism. An extremely liberal, atheist British comedian came out in support of Britain’s new free speech [...]