Over the years, the Czech Christmas Mass, "Hej, mistře" (Hail, master!), by Jakub Jan Ryba has become an inherent part of Czech tradition. This is mainly owing to the simplicity, the emotional impact and pure comprehensiveness of Ryba's music. Ryba wrote his Christmas Mass "Hail, master!" in 1796. Its programmatic sequence basically follows the plot used in the folk [...]
Last year I was asked by the Precentor of Wells Cathedral if I would write an extra 8th Antiphon sonnet to go with the special 8th O antiphon, O Virgo Virginum, which was used in English churches and Cathedrals in the middle ages, as distinct from the usual seven on the continent. He explained that the Cathedral was [...]
Yes, there are always the Scrooges who seek to spoil the Christmas party, staying out in the cold and dark. Meanwhile, warming ourselves at the hearth, let’s get into the spirit of the Season and enjoy a modern Christmas carol translated into Old English. One doesn’t need to be a Christian to enjoy Christmas. Or, [...]
People are not abandoning the churches because they are too religious, but because they are not religious enough. They understand that if a religion is about no more than mouthing spiritual platitudes and working at the soup kitchen, then they don’t need to get up early on a Sunday and troop off to church to [...]
A rare breed of humans knows the limits of its time and is less concerned with its immediate relevancy and more with what it leaves behind. If we are to cultivate a similar vision, we must learn to be such “dinosaurs”… Edward E. Ericson, Jr., was a dinosaur. When I call Ericson a dinosaur, I’m [...]
Neither a pacifist’s nor a militant’s novel, Her Privates We is praiseworthy both for its unforgettable characters and for its compelling, if necessarily tentative, exploration of this mystery of personhood under extreme pressure. Her Privates We by Frederic Manning (272 pages, Serpent’s Tail, 1999) Almost everyone enjoys a good detective story, and Her Privates We is [...]
What happens to the Romans in the absence of their greatest man, Camillus? Crushing losses, near-obliteration. Not to honor what is best and highest—in fact, to insult it, to belittle it, to attribute base motives to it: What can follow except an arrogant forgetfulness that preludes disaster? Titus Livius (or Livy), the Roman historian whose [...]
The imaginative conservative must not just be a person who parrots the slogans of other conservatives without understanding the details and the truths which are often two-sided coins or even multifaceted gems. Rather, the imaginative conservative must see things from different angles, must be able to plan, must see the interactions among religion, history, philosophy, [...]
American composer William Henry Fry wrote the highly enjoyable Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony in 1853, deeming it "the longest instrumental composition ever written on a single subject, with unbroken continuity." This claim, which is probably true, is quite surprising, as is the fact that the legend of Santa Claus was already ingrained in American culture [...]
In No One Way to School, Ashley Rogers Berner shows that a variety of schools cultivate civic virtue in students and argues that public schools are inferior to their charter and private counterparts in this endeavor… No One Way to School: Pluralism and the American Public Education by Ashley Rogers Berner (185 pages, Palmgrave Macmillan, 2017) [...]
Both George C. Marshall and Ronald Reagan were “conservative internationalists”: peace-through-strength realists who did not lose sight of their democratic principles, and who engaged with other nations to achieve not only American security and prosperity, but also a greater measure of freedom and justice in the world. Within this past year occurred both the thirtieth [...]
It has been quipped that every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him. If you really want to know James Bond you need to read Ian Fleming’s novels. They are ripping good adventure stories, just like the movies. However, the literary Bond also has a lot more seriousness [...]
English musician Steven Wilson’s "Hand. Cannot. Erase" is extraordinary by the standards of any genre. His subject matter is the uniqueness of each human person, and he focuses on the life of one lost soul. An Incarnational Whole One of the greatest things in this whirligig of a world—however fraught with a string of perilous [...]
Editor’s Note: We invite you to join Thomas Jefferson (portrayed by Bill Barker) as he explores the remarkable history of the early American Republic and the principles that undergird it. From Jamestown to Plymouth, from the American Revolution to the Louisiana Purchase, the promise of free enterprise has driven the course of human history on [...]