Christopher Nolan’s rightly celebrated movie is not what you expect to see. It uses the life and times of the father of the atomic bomb to denounce a world made wretched by the lack of truth. And T.S. Eliot becomes a seer of hope, prophesying that, before the nuke-metaphor explodes, there is still a chance [...]
Shortly after the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, Sammy Kaye and Don Reid wrote the music and Reid wrote the words to "Remember Pearl Harbor." On December 17, 1941, RCA Victor recorded the song, with Sammy Kaye's Swing and Sway Band and The Glee Club.* History in ev'ry century records an act that lives [...]
Reconsidered, some classic works of the Great War challenge our customary apprehension of the literature of this period and prompt fresh thinking about these writings. The war and the widespread disruptions of the years following it stirred up questions about meaning and value, about ties between the past and the future, about the mystery and [...]
A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]
The Bolsheviks were coming! The news was enough to make the blood of the people of the village of Suessenbergrun run cold. The Bolsheviks were atheists. They had no human decency, no respect for human lives. In this atmosphere I tried to settle into my normal parochial duties. But these very duties were colored with [...]
This Veterans Day, I would encourage you to remember and honor veterans, but less because what they have done, and more because of what their service represents—that is, a space for robust civil society, and human flourishing. Our nation has been at war now for more than a decade. Since the first troops were sent [...]
Louis Awerbuck believed that societies fell to folly when they drew distinct lines between their warriors and scholars. What this ultimately led to was a society’s thinking being done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Awerbuck saw himself as the keeper of a tradition, a heritage of warriors in ages past, and civilization’s [...]
If we are seeking an end to war, we need to begin seeking the true peace that passeth all understanding. This is the peace of Christ. Those “progressives” who put their faith in the perfectibility of Man are invariably made to look stupid by the very future that they idealize and idolize. Take, for instance, [...]
Since the God of justice is the God of charity it follows that although a war may be justified, one may not enter into it in a spirit of hate. We too often identify what is really a sin against charity with a love of justice. It is precisely against this divorce of justice and [...]
It is from careful textual analysis of “The Federalist” that the basic symbols of the American political tradition, and indeed the conservative tradition, may be found. III In his analysis of the Socrates of the Apology, Willmoore Kendall was hinting strongly at the probability that the contemporary John Stuart Mill-Karl Popper school in the United [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
In the reading, listening, and viewing I’ve done recently on the ever-troubling question of the use of atomic bombs on Japan, what I’ve noticed clearly for the first time is the seemingly inexorable retributory escalation in word and deed not so hidden under the ostensible arguments of life-saving necessity. On the Feast of St. Augustine, [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]
More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry's vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him. The [...]