In America today, the bewildering “what I want” faction topples statues, rewrites history, decolonizes curricula, detaches identities from ontological realities, indoctrinates our youth, and tries to impose its utopian totalitarianism. What we see unfolding in the world and in our country is war. It is the war that began for us when a woman listened [...]
Editorializing in news stories, once verboten, has now become de rigueur. Journalism, never perfect at any moment of its history, but full of aspiration to be objective and balanced, has now conceded entirely to Nietzsche’s critique of empiricism: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Many years ago, in an earlier contentious era of American politics, [...]
Other university presidents, provosts, and deans need to support and emulate President Morton Schapiro of Northwestern University. If they can find the courage to support somebody else standing up against the mob, they might find that they have the courage to stand up to their own mobs and discover that when there is no pursuit [...]
Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our ability to address this problem. In [...]
The present bombing of Armenia and Artsakh is meant to fulfill the Young Turk dream of building an Empire. That dream is alive and well in Turkey’s government today. By honoring and listening to historian Bernard Lewis, we have become accomplices of that dream, that nightmare. It is time to wake up and hold fast [...]
To maintain sanity and perspective, we must recognize that beauty is a transcendent ideal in which art imperfectly participates, and thus hold beauty above art. The wrong turn is due to a conflation of beauty with art and the related tendency to see art as an end in itself. As conservatives we often undertake to [...]
The relationship between science and the humanities is unavoidable simply because genealogies, in the end, are an extension of man’s thinking that combines reality with myth. Thomas Kuhn seemed to accept this fact, but today his colleagues’ aversion toward myth and magic has effected new iterations of magic that are devoid of meaning and spirituality. [...]
Frequently in public forums, people forget Augustine’s simple truth: Words fail or succeed based on what truth or reality they represent to their audience. Augustine would ask us to further the “mutual intercourse of men” and remember that words serve us by their remembrance, their representation, and their reality. As a literature teacher, I thought [...]
The bold yet solution-adverse signatories of the “Harper’s” letter are pointing us toward a world where the left and right side of the aisle can once again amicably communicate. Nowhere is this more important than on college campuses, where students should be immersed in a world of thought and discourse that pushes the boundaries of [...]
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 [...]
Secular relativists and Europhobes in academics say that based on entirely subjective criteria, a Eurocentric culture collectively decided that certain art was great and cruelly imposed that view on other peoples through “culture imperialism.” But is it really true that people in the West twisted arms and forced people to like Western art and music? [...]
At the end of the film, Farinelli’s smile meant peace. It was the peace of a man who loved, of a man who had accepted his fate, of a man who had a future, of a man who was no longer the judge and standard—despite having suffered unjustly. It was the peace of a man [...]
The natural laws that the academics and intellectuals have for centuries been trying to think and feel out of existence, the laws undergirding all of reality, do not kowtow to the thoughts and actions of mere human beings. They continue to inform reality and will overwhelm anyone who does not bow to them, as all [...]
A traditional liberal arts curriculum elevates the tastes, ennobles the sentiments, and orders the mind to truth: Socratic questioning forces critical reflection on the content and coherency of one’s ideas; a vigorous and integrated life of grace and prayer keeps the mind and heart strong, pure, integrated, and focused on Jesus Christ. Yet to bring [...]