My heart breaks for Tolkien's Denethor, whose life ended unnecessarily, as bitterness, anger, and hopelessness in the face of evil consumed him. Let our prayer be that, even as we observe the darkness at the doorstep of Western Civilization, we imaginative conservatives stand at our posts and look to the Heavenly Father as our protector. [...]
The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]
To assess accurately the state of Western Civilization, one needs to understand how the Western tradition, standing at the peak of its influence and popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, ended up in such a state of siege a century later. The reports of the death of Western Civilization are neither premature nor [...]
Christopher Dawson’s work is a kaleidoscopic treatment of a dizzying amount of Western history. Throughout, he looks at everything from the giant, even “theocratic” and “unitary” states such as Charlemagne’s empire, to the smaller “petty states of France and the Low Countries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.” While he is objective about the goods [...]
There was a missing element in the Secretary of State’s speech. Something essential was missing, something that needed to be highlighted if these calls to heroism and excellence were to be heeded. This same lacuna is found in much of the nationalist literature that seeks to revitalize Western values. On October 7, Secretary of State [...]
Solzhenitsyn understood the crisis of our time—namely, the failure of those who make, enjoy, and judge the constitutionality of laws to appreciate the dire consequences of denying the place of natural-law considerations in the ordering of public life. Some 20,000 umbrella-carrying attendees witnessed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address on a rainy afternoon at Harvard University in [...]
The West is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things. But what will be left when the secularist “West” is dead? I expected my recent essay “Race Against Reason” to provoke an element of controversy and was not surprised when it elicited the following comment: Yes, this is all well and [...]
Whatever hells have been loosed upon the world, here in America and abroad, never forget that our ancestors, even pagan ones, called us to love and cherish that which is best. Every autumn, I have the grand privilege of teaching Socrates (the Apology, the Crito), Plato (Book VIII of the Republic, the Timaeus), and Aristotle [...]
My greatest concern as a teacher for more than thirty years was my students’ inability or unwillingness to read. I repeatedly tried, and repeatedly failed, to persuade them that when they read, they were not merely absorbing information, but were also, and more importantly, rehearsing acts of imagination. I. “Bisogna saper leggere,” Jakob Burckhardt told [...]
Like medieval monks who preserved civilization after the fall of Rome, traditionalists can live active lives and work to keep the flame of Western culture alive. To do so, we must build loving families, construct independent schools, and erect parallel institutions to challenge those that have betrayed their purpose. Some time ago, while living in [...]
The animating principle of medieval culture, insofar as it is distinct from Antiquity or Modernity, is the conviction that the ultimate and highest reality is found in the unseen realm—which means that the most fundamental and fruitful way to embrace the medieval spirit is to practice the Faith more like an ordinary Christian of the [...]
The problem with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is, ironically, that it is too Christian. Despite the hubbub from some online conservatives screaming about how “woke” it is (usually before seeing it), the real deficiency of the movie is that it whitewashes the barbarity of the ancient world. It makes Odysseus seem like a Christian, at least [...]
In his personal letters, Eric Voegelin not only mocked Russell Kirk and conservatism, but he also freely admitted that he cynically accepted funding from conservative sources, even though he had no sympathy with conservatism. And yet he was a genius, one of the single finest thinkers of the 20th century, and perhaps the single finest [...]
In "Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears," Hungarian philosopher of art László Földényi shows how the Enlightenment brought about a radical shift in the understanding of the human body, and the consequences that arose from the attempt to divorce the physical body from its metaphysical context. Dostoyevskey Reads Hegel in Siberia and [...]