This is the ultimate message of Homer’s two epics: Where family is found, life is found; where family is found, true beauty is found; where family is found, piety is found; where family is dissolved, only death and destruction follows... The Trojan War, for our Homeric heroes, begins with marital infidelity and succumbing to temptation, [...]
The purpose of growing old is to grow up. The purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and virtue (the two are synonymous, though the latter word is banned from all polite discourse in our rancid and rotten culture). If one grows old without growing in wisdom, one is a miserable loser. For most [...]
It would be difficult to find a more beautiful republican thought in all of Edmund Burke’s writings than this: “A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing [...]
“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” Editor’s Note: In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis [...]
Taken together, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton might not be a holy trinity but they are certainly a holy triumvirate enabling us to see the world with rooted clarity and childlike wisdom. One of the most interesting and spontaneously thought-provoking questions that I’ve ever been asked in an interview was asked by an [...]
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 24 […]
Demonstrations that are political possess a tendency to be governed by loudness and force rather than by reflection and thought, and thus bear the shrill dictates of power instead of being willing servants to truth. And above all, we should remember that there is simply no point in winning the argument if we know we [...]
The art of war… as it is certainly the noblest of all arts, so in the progress of improvement it necessarily becomes one of the most complicated among them. The state of the mechanical, as well as of some other arts, with which it is necessarily connected, determines the degree of perfection to which it [...]
Apart from occasionally going to a sports bar to watch my favourite English soccer team, the only time I ever watch television is in hotel rooms or at the gym. Almost every time I do so I am reminded of the great blessing of not having one of these palantiri in my home. Occasionally, however, [...]
Between classes at about ten fifteen on the morning of December 12, 1978, Bert Thoms collapsed of a heart attack. He died soon after in the hospital. His colleague and friend, the Reverend F. Winfree Smith, conducted the funeral service in a crowded Great Hall on the morning of December 16, a soft, bright, almost balmy [...]
The film “Gladiator” imparts a feeling of what living according to Stoic virtue might be. One of the best Stoic lines of dialogue in the film is given to Maximus, who says: “I knew a man who once said, ‘Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.’” In Ridley Scott’s [...]
Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and [...]
Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the world. I formulated it for publication in 1999 and had it formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred years ago by Augustine in 399 A.D. and some three quarters of a millennium before that [...]
Where have all the grown-ups gone, Long time passing? Where have all the grown-ups gone, Long time ago? Those of my generation might recall the song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, a hit record by the Kingston Trio, among others, composed by Pete Seeger. Part of the folk music revival of the 1950s and [...]