It is undoubtedly true that our first and primary loyalty is the love due to family rather than the state. Even if it brings death, the choice of love rather than power is the most heroic thing a human can choose. Aristotle in the Poetics defined the heart of tragedy as the imitation of admirable [...]
Michael Haydn's Requiem—like the composer himself—has receded into the historical mists. But this astounding work heavily influenced Mozart's own Requiem and is worthy of comparison with every other setting of the Mass for the Dead ever composed. Michael Haydn The 1984 film Amadeus brought to the general public's attention that many minor composers [...]
The moon is full, The trees are bare, Dead leaves glide through The cool, dry air. The night is silent as a grave, Or some deep, dark, unfathomed cave Beneath the stars’ cold stare. […]
As we ponder the meaning of history and ethics, we must ask: How do we reach unity without conformity? What should be conserved? And exactly what is freedom for? Our beginnings are quite noble and quite heroic. When the Persian god kings looked at the decentralized, myriad Greek City States, they were filled with pride [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien was right: Fairy-stories do hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves: who we are, who we might become, and who we are called to be. To gaze into such a mirror is perilous; to fail to do so, is more perilous still. In his famous lecture and essay “On Fairy-Stories”, [...]
Our rights as Americans can never be separated from our duties. But we must also ask, what is our liberty for? We live in an age of determinism, especially when it comes to academics and academia. There’s little choice, it seems, and everything is driven by some autonomous and often abstract forces, progressively (often) and [...]
Conservatives must preserve and pass on the riches of the past, but we must also be aware of and open to the opportunities of the present, so that the proper fusion of old and new will inspire and enable truly great art. From time to time I publish on Twitter my view of the social [...]
Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. “The moral imagination is… man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” –Russell Kirk In his book The Catholic Writer [...]
In the end, we can know who we are in light of what we are called to be, or we can know nothing because we believe that life is nothing and that it signifies nothing. It is the choice between life and death, and between the culture of life and the culture of death. Where [...]
We live in a time of gross lies in our public sphere. Many of the lies we tell these days involve phantom ills: racism or sexism or various “phobias” that must be exaggerated. Might these false and exaggerated fears be stand-ins for the real ills that we have suffered, but which we have not been [...]
Isn’t part of the problem in the culture at large a lack of the personal correction and encouragement that accompany truly being known to those around us? Don Rags sessions have an immediate effect on the behavior of students, as professors often notice, but they mean more than that. This kind of recognition helps personal [...]
Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]
As American society reaches its final stages of decay, the price of denying reality will prove ever greater, awakening people to their folly and ruin. A metaphysical crisis of vast proportions awaits a world that has long ignored existential questions to its peril. These are anti-metaphysical times. Most people don’t realize it because they know [...]
Indifferentism in religion only serves to weaken all religion, for when the dogma and the distinctive devotions go, all we are left with is a kind of vanilla-pudding spirituality. In his recent book The Return of the Strong Gods, Rusty Reno catalogues the concerted effort, after the Second World War, of philosophers, political thinkers, economists, and theologians [...]