Free citizens are necessarily invited to follow the Delphic injunction, “know thyself,” that is addressed to all mankind; and their success or failure in responding to this invitation is crucial for the preservation or loss of their liberty. Liberal education is the distinctive educational tradition of the West; so, too, is liberty our distinctive political [...]
The heightened pace of life in industrial societies, Charles Lindbergh realized, necessitated reflection on what type of life is best suited for man. Which of the two, reason or vital instinct, constitutes the best function of human beings? Which of the two contributes best to man’s happiness and lasting well-being? Charles Lindbergh begins his Autobiography [...]
Confronted with choices between evil and good, man frequently chooses evil with its accompanying anguish. Would not wisdom and prudence dictate that man ought to be modest, restrained, and humble—in a word, pious? Born in Weaverville, North Carolina in 1910, Richard Malcolm Weaver was raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Weaver graduated [...]
In the post-Enlightenment world in which we live, we are rarely left alone in peace and quiet. We are continually pushed to do more and to be more and to do so more quickly and efficiently. Traditional works of literature, however, beckon us into a world that is frozen in time yet alive with desire, [...]
Some people frolic in the European Middle Age, whereas most people hearing that designation think hair loss and weight gain. And that is too bad, because there and then resided Geoffrey Chaucer, the second greatest poet in English. If only the selective reading public knew better, they would be dazzled by his masterwork, The Book [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]