As Christians, we may say that God is our Good Shepherd, our Rock and our Salvation, our Lawgiver and King, the Light of the World, and rejoice that we have these names—as opposed to definitions—that help us to understand Him. Analytic philosophy is limited in its scope regarding the knowledge of God. Richard Swinburne, a [...]
To save democracy from subjectivism, truth must become a democratic project. The greatest of crimes can be enacted in the name of sincerity, authenticity, and “being at peace with oneself.” Each of these criteria looks to one’s own estimate of oneself… During the Presidential Campaign of 1996, in California, President Bill Clinton said that democracy [...]
One of our most remarkable capabilities is our power of at once being and not being in a certain condition. It gives us a way to do justice both to self-avowed fictions and to other people’s truths. Our country’s three major religions, in order of their entry into time, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are scriptural. To adhere to [...]
C.S. Lewis believed that immutable and timeless universal principles governed all persons throughout time and space. Though these principles would find manifestations particular to era, culture, and individual, the rules remained eternal. Additionally, these natural laws would always and everywhere be “self-evident.” Men might choose to ignore, distort, or mock them, but they could not [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in "The Abolition of Man," we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests. No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
A result of the fact-or-opinion training is that two categories are created in the mind of the student: things that are true, and things that are neither true nor false. Essentially, the fact-or-opinion curriculum is first-rate training for thinking relativistically… “That’s just your opinion.” My students and my children have given vent to this phrase [...]
As modern art has drifted away from traditional Beauty, it has also abandoned Truth and Goodness, rejecting God, religion, and nature in one fell swoop… “Guernica,” by Pablo Picasso (1937) To engage in dialogue about beauty and art is to navigate a tricky mire. Regardless of the exact point of contention, there are [...]
Except for mystics, the goal of Western philosophers and theologians has been to find the right ideas, whereas Eastern thinkers seek the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things. I wish to suggest that the Western and Eastern paths to the true, the good, and the beautiful can be [...]
Friedrich Nietzsche sought to change the world, and there is significant evidence that the existentialist philosopher succeeded. Many of the contemporary world’s assumptions regarding the primacy of individualism and the disavowal of universals were exposited by Nietzsche.[1] Yet, one of this thinker’s most important revolutions lay in his complete redefinition of philosophy. The dominant ideas [...]
Tradition, philosophy, and religion long ago succumbed to science as the sole arbiter of truth, but now science too has been dethroned. What rules today is a different form of ideology—ideas and images replace concrete experience. Can we escape the Screen with its hollow images and counterfeit emotions and experience the human way of life?… At [...]
The first fragment of Plato's Timaeus is worth a lifetime of study. There is a whole education in just these few lines. The attention drawn to mathematics from them and the elevation of mathematics in the rest of the Timaeus made Western thinkers look to mathematics for truth. Science started when Christians thought hard about two books: [...]
Feminists conclude that human biology must be transcended in order for women to be free—indeed, that there needs to be a wholesale revolution against biology and human nature itself if women are ever to be free... “In This House, We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real, [...]
Over the course of several hundred years, Americans, as well as Europeans, freed themselves from the past, transformed nature into a commodity, centralized political power, and instituted bureaucracies, all with the aim of making themselves happy in this world. Unlike Eve eating fruit from the forbidden tree, the beginning of the Second Fall can be [...]
I wonder whether the Benedict Option will be allowed by God. The problem for a lay monastic movement is that we laity are called to be salt and light in a fundamentally different way from monks and nuns. Salt does not do any good for the food when it is clumped together in a mass; [...]