Food is a way to enjoy being alive. Drink wine and dance around the kitchen; kiss your beloved. Life can be beautiful… Experts with scientific credentials tell us the best way to resolve interpersonal conflicts, how to raise children, and what food to eat. These new gurus maintain that in principle scientific truths can guide [...]
If you’ve seen Jan Steen’s famous painting The Feast of St. Nicholas, you understand what an important place that holiday holds in the hearts of Dutch children, like my neighbor, Stien. “A famous legend,” I declare carelessly of the one of the tales of the saint; she corrects me: “not a legend, but a true [...]
The militant nationalism of the twentieth century made it futile to assert clear ideas, to ask honest questions, to make reasoned judgments, or to engage in truthful debate… Permit me to begin at the end. Joseph Pearce is concerned with the power of an international bureaucracy and the advent of a world government that will [...]
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien fought to defend Faith and Family from attacks upon them by modern-day dragons, but they would not wield the power of the Deplorable Word, nor the power of the Ring, to destroy their enemies, simultaneously destroying the lives of innocent victims in the process. In “Litany of the Lost,” a [...]
Members of democratic nations, especially Americans, have almost unlimited personal freedom because the constraints of class, local communities, and family have been greatly weakened. But we are also free to choose to step off the consumer treadmill, refuse to seek material success for us alone, and attempt to serve others, materially, emotionally, and spiritually. In [...]
The “separation of church and state” was intended in part to prevent the sorts of religious conflicts that had racked Europe in previous centuries. Nevertheless, it was only a matter of time before the ambiguity of this figure of speech would be exploited. During her confirmation hearing last September, Notre Dame law professor, Amy Coney Barrett, [...]
Concerned with the intrigues of the cathedral clergy and the landed gentry, Anthony Trollope portrays Victorian English life with all its high moral values and noble ideals as well as its greed, snobbery, and hypocrisy… Anthony Trollope I’ve usually prefer the underrated and unpopular. Buster Keaton not Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Sayers not Agatha [...]
The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity… Our family lives in the kind of town most people only see in fiction: an archetypal, small, Midwestern town of picket fences and blocks of mostly modest bungalows. Homes [...]
“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken,” writes Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. And such is the impression made upon us by Dosteovsky’s incredible psychological masterpiece… “Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than [...]
Exactly how the Roman republic came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Critically so. As with our tradition of English common law and the necessity of knowing that its origins are “beyond the memory of man,” from “time immemorial,” “ancient beyond memory or record,” and “time out of mind,” so it is with the best [...]
Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position. There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying the cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]
A rotten culture that has long taught men that “everything goes” is now turning on those who pursued this norm with great passion… The spectacular fall of Harvey Weinstein represents more than just the rejection of the appalling behavior of a Hollywood mogul. Rather, it is the unsurprising confirmation that Hollywood is rotten. The behavior [...]
State Sovereigntists made their biggest stand over the Treaty of Peace. Their resistance to the Treaty played a critical role in shaping how Americans understood the role state sovereignty played in both the constitutional system and politics. The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765-1800 by N. Coleman (294 pages, Lexington Books, 2016) [...]
The power of imagination is to see things whole, to see things clearly, to see things with sanctity, to see things with love… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Alan Cornett as he discusses Wendell Berry’s thoughts on environmentalism and climate change, wealth and the economy, hope and [...]