Fiction often clarifies our thinking about moral quandaries, distilling muddy waters into clear ones and dissecting our common human experience. The stories of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne do just this. In the scope of American literature, Melville and Hawthorne reflect both the reasoning of the Enlightenment and the emotional and spiritual influence of the [...]
By ending the year with an awards ceremony, the school shows that education is more than knowledge transfer; education involves forming the human person to have the capacities to value what should be valued… Grades are in, lockers clean, report cards sent home. But, in the words of Aladdin’s Genie, “We’re not through yet!” The [...]
Sexual misconduct is usually characterized as some kind of “power grab,” typically carried out by ruthless men seeking to prey upon the vulnerability of a woman. Yet Plato suggests that disordered sexual desire is a problem of the democratic soul. Speaking about British actress Kadian Noble’s lawsuit filed against Harvey Weinstein on the grounds of [...]
To do the honorable thing is to submit the whole of one’s being to the belief that there is underlying all human life and interaction, and indeed all of existence, a universal sense of right and wrong. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Jeremy A. Kee as [...]
Sin is the most normal thing of all throughout the ages of human experience. It is far more normal than virtue. There are always far more sinners than there are saints... “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” G.K. Chesterton (What’s Wrong with the [...]
Until individuals, families, institutions, and government are restored to their proper roles, America will continue crashing through the debt ceiling… It is official: The national debt has now exceeded $21 trillion. The tragic news comes just six months after it hit $20 trillion last September 8. This problem is obviously not going away. By voting to suspend [...]
The qualities that I would love most of all to see in all our students could not be better described than by Edmund Burke’s account of the chivalric demeanor: “that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom”… As a [...]
Economics alone will not provide the answer to the tariff question. We need to address the superior side of man’s nature, which is spiritual. When this spiritual side is addressed, it guides and gives rise to political, social, cultural, and economic solutions in sync with human nature… As I watch the debate over tariffs, I [...]
Dante reminded us that this world is good, as far it goes, but it is not the ultimate. We love this land well, but not as the final resting place for our bones. We are exiles until the New Heaven and the New Earth… Only the exile can create a home where he cannot live, [...]
Is it not refined cruelty to keep alive, in self-loathing, a man who is a grave danger to the innocent and a grisly horror to himself? And to do such a thing in countries long admired for the justice of their laws? To perceive truth, we require images. As G.K. Chesterton put it, all life [...]
Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words, how can a good God permit bad things [...]
Where there are bishops of moral vigor, there will be an abundance of young men willing to take up the call of service to the Church. Where the spirit is tepid and refreshes itself on the thin broth of a domesticated and politically correct Gospel, seminaries will be vacant… To have been the proverbial fly [...]
After tainting Oedipus, Sigmund Freud goes even further in his defaming of virtuous characters in literature, dragging the noble Hamlet through the same ignoble mire of his smutty, sex-obsessed imagination… The ignorant pronounce it Frood, to cavil or applaud. The well-informed pronounce it Froyd, But I pronounce it Fraud. —G.K. Chesterton (“On Professor Freud”) Poor old Oedipus. [...]
In the modern world, terms like “soul,” “spirit,” and the “life of the mind” sound antiquated, and there is no longer any sense that there is anything to life beyond the pursuit of hedonic happiness and the accumulation of money, property, and other markers of worldly success… “To reform a world, to reform a nation, [...]