Earlier this summer, I was walking in our backyard, and I saw one of the brothers picking up cicadas from the sidewalk and putting them back on the trees they had fallen off, and it struck me that cicadas were a good image for the spiritual life. If King David can write in the Psalms [...]
"Man is autonomous, and each person is able to determine his own selfhood and destiny. This is a given," said Dr. Agrippa. "The first step is to invite the patient to assert his own volition and ego dominance. Once he has repudiated any other power or force, he is ready for the ritual we call [...]
Last month, in an essay entitled “Chesterton Meets the Devil”, I discussed the period of youthful morbidity which characterized Chesterton’s time at the Slade School of Art in the early 1890s. This gloom-laden period inspired “The Diabolist,” one of Chesterton’s darkest and most powerful essays. Published in Tremendous Trifles in 1909, it recounts an episode [...]
The boy I saw fishing was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. It made me realize that in leisure, we open ourselves to receive God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary. Be at leisure – and know [...]
Wicked foolishness continues apace on the higher academic earth. The flood is sweeping away institution after institution. Yet at least one righteous man is gathering together verbal creatures of every kind—masculine, feminine, and neuter— into an ark and waiting for the flood waters to recede. First, the wicked foolishness. Almost a year ago, my fellow [...]
This is what Courage means to Socrates: It is descriptively distinct from and essentially identical with all the virtues. For us this “paradoxical” outcome sets a task—we are to figure out how it might become intelligible. Euripides, it is reported, was “Socrato-nailed-down” (σωκρατογόμφους) – that is, patched up, bolted together, by Socrates.1 I understand this term [...]
One of America’s most cherished symbols, of course, is the American Declaration of Independence, and its Promethean author, Thomas Jefferson—a document and a man whom subsequent generations have blurred together in a myth of no mean proportion. It is the immediate task of this essay to unravel that myth so we will know what we [...]
In Dante’s vision, fraud is the deepest, most infernal sin, and yet it does not appear at all among the capital sins whose punishments are willingly undergone in "Purgatorio." Why is that? Earlier this week, I read a moving essay by Rod Dreher in Touchstone about how he discovered Dante during a hard time in [...]
Thanks to feverish cosmopolitanism and globalism, many Americans have grown up rootless and hyper-mobile, so they have little in the way of local "patria" with which to connect. The American patriot increasingly looks like the Atlantean or Trojan patriot, forced to carry within himself whatever residual sense of home and connection to place and people [...]
Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood have together recaptured for us the importance of Whig political theory for our view of ourselves as a people, the initiation of the Revolution, the creation of our enduring political institutions, and the writing of our national Constitution. In doing so they have forced us to seek the origins of [...]
What is the source of moral authority for modernity's doctrine that homosexuality is moral, other than some transient ideology, which Russell Kirk reminded us is political religion? What is the source of the morality that teaches same-sex unions are the equal of traditional marriage and any government that does not agree is a bigoted regime [...]
Today, Europe’s heroic heart—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics—is again being attacked, this time by the forces of globalism, as the imperialists of the European Union seek to force these small but courageous countries to embrace the lunacy of cancel culture. There really are none so blind as those who will not see. [...]
Enlightenment individualism prepared the foundation for self-expression, which has culminated in the identification of oneself with one’s sexual urges. Not only can the modern individual define who he is, but, in so doing, can also contribute to the re-definition of what humanity itself is. In checking the news it is reported that a man who [...]
What really made me love New York City was the discovery of some of those conscious forces G.K. Chesterton talked about. I discovered that not only were the famous five boroughs their own conscious forces, but within the boroughs were smaller forces—neighborhoods just as homey and parochial as any small town anywhere. Though I grew [...]