The Great Tradition patiently endures, ready to speak on its own behalf, ready to challenge narrow prejudices, ready to examine those with the courage to be interrogated by it, ready to teach those who are willing to be made unfit for the modern world. The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be [...]
While everyday life feels rootless, cultural and artistic accomplishment stands as a steady anchor and source of pride and joy and discovery. Music, the most popular and beloved of the arts, connects us to something higher than us, perhaps a way of life and set of feelings that flourished before we were born. Music can [...]
Several trends have alienated ordinary laypeople from the worlds of both art and intellect, contributing to anti-intellectualism and hostility to the arts, as well as simple indifference to the finer things of culture. This is deplorable because the arts and the life of the mind are both important. When I was about five years old, [...]
Sign up for Joseph Pearce’s course on Classical Epic and Tragedy this Fall: https://rosary.college/applicant-registration/ What do the great literary epics tell us about the epochs in which they were written? And, more important, what do these epics and epochs tell us about our own epoch? To what extent are literary epics the children of their [...]
For Harold Bloom, our intellectual strength, the strength of Western civilization, consists in the canon: “Without the Canon we cease to think.” Reading canonical literature serves the individual exclusively: “It enables one to know and endure oneself as a human being.” In the introduction to his controversial masterpiece The Western Canon: The Books and School [...]
True unity among men must have its roots in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself. One wonders whether tradition is not actually anti-historical. It stands in stark contrast to the most impressive and most visible strand of the historical process, namely, the ever-advancing scientific investigation of [...]
As the plane landed, my fascinating conversation with the lady with the hat ended. It was like a window into a sector of the American public normally not engaged in the culture war. The incident gave me insight into what might be happening beneath the surface of the material paradises that dot the national landscape. [...]
The civilization birthed by Israel, Greece, and Rome is the source of culture and individual traditions that can nourish us—traditions that can give us purpose, order, and beauty and rescue us from despair, boredom, and banality. Follow it and live by it, even if others scorn and abandon it. After all, it made us who [...]
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 baptism or sanctification of the pagan reflects the baptism and sanctification of the self. Like the former pagan sites, the Christian person too goes through a process of being lost, baptized, and sanctified. St. Paul, at Mars’ Hill, had helped break the Heraclitian, Platonic, and Stoic cycles of the classical world, by sanctifying the [...]
From the Roman Catholic perspective, the Logos is the beginning, the middle, and the end of time and history, and history itself is a reflection of the Logos. Each person—from Adam to the last person—is a finite reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Image of God, an incarnate soul. In the stunningly poetic [...]
Sohrab Ahmari’s book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos," makes the sustained case that too much freedom—or rather, too much of the wrong sort of freedom—can be a kind of slavery. The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari (320 [...]
Despite the immense, hydra-headed problems that have arisen over the last 500 years of the West and of the World, the Church’s mission has never wavered, whatever its obstacles, internal and external. As since the beginning of its existence, it must leaven the good, promote the true, and, through subcreation, engage the beautiful. Through the [...]
The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been damaged or destroyed? In the early twenty-first century, the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition [...]