When the U.S. Senate recently voted to make daylight saving time permanent, I could not help but feel that something had been adulterated. Instead of respecting time and its Author, we dare to put ourselves at the center of things. The subject should not cause much debate since it appears to be a technical issue. [...]
So, how to make C.S. Lewis even greater? Enter Father Michael Ward’s invaluable "After Humanity." After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" by Michael Ward (241 pages, Word on Fire Academic, 2021) As 2021 drew to a close, I had the opportunity over at Catholic World Report to praise Father Michael [...]
Religious teaching tells us that God destined us for eternal life, but that sin caused death to enter the world. A great mythopoetic idea—but how are we to understand it? One of the most striking statements about Easter I have ever read comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde was commenting on the contrast between the Middle [...]
When observing beautiful art or music, how do we feel? Comfort, joy, and even euphoria come to us. We are drawn in by the otherworldly-ness of it all. But what about stark or disturbing art? A Flannery O’Connor character’s gory end shocks us. The tragic eyes of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son unsettle us. [...]
Holy Week is a week of paradoxes: the greatest evil and the greatest good occupy the same deed, the same space on the Cross, the same tomb. At Wyoming Catholic College, the phenomenon known elsewhere as “spring break,” which sounds more or less restful, comprises an important part of our outdoor curriculum. Most students go [...]
Time taken does not perish because it is made of imperishable things, such as truth itself. It exists in eternity liberated from the shadow of transient things. Time is a great mystery. It is... but we don’t really know what it is. We know that we are subject to it and that it is not [...]
For many in the American colonies, it was an open question: Should you favor independence, are you also willing to surrender your lives, your honor, and your sacred fortunes? One of my greatest duties at Hillsdale College is teaching an upper-level course entitled Founding of the American Republic. My colleague, David Raney, and I share [...]
These last days of Lent might be a good time to remember those who have come before us in our families, those who begot us and those who begot them, and so on backward into that past where every one of our ancestors used the pronoun “I” just as we do in this living moment. [...]
Glenn Ellmers has written an enlightening biography of the late Harry Jaffa, a political theorist whose views on the American Founding have become conventional wisdom in certain conservative circles. But I find Willmoore Kendall’s views more persuasive, and his warning about the danger of the Jaffa thesis more prescient. The Soul of Politics: Harry V. [...]
Left to our own devices, we tend toward tragedy. Enter Jesus Christ. The Playwright himself has entered into his play, and he has come to take tragedy and completely transform it. In this act, he assumes all our tragic tendencies into his glorious and salvific Passion. The Lord’s tragedy turns our own tragedies into the [...]
We chain ourselves to God to receive the true freedom to keep our promises and to further give our lives away to God and to others. Action—doing, giving, even enduring—are what is important. Not our feeling, psychological state, or natural optimism. The Joy of God: Collected Writings, by Sister Mary David (208 pages, Bloomsbury, 2020) [...]
Complex and perceptive, Willmoore Kendall's ideas remain relevant as the most important intellectual defense of the American people’s right to rule itself rather than to submit to the tyranny of experts. He is the man who engineered the foundation, structure, and superstructure of a bridge to democracy with his own formidable intellect and tremendous erudition. [...]
Stepping back out of the snapshot of 1953, I am struck by a world which bears many of the hallmarks of our own deplorable epoch. The most striking difference, and it is a grim and sobering one, is that our own techno-dominated peers seem much more comfortable with their enslavement to Big Brother than were [...]
Like the Israelites, we are to look upon the One who has been lifted up so that we will be healed. We who are plagued by impatience are to look on the truly Patient One as he undergoes his Passion. This past Sunday we entered into the two-week period traditionally known as Passiontide. As we [...]