There I was, two hours into the eleven-hour flight. Then I heard the piece, the same one I’d been listening to for months, and suddenly I knew right then that my life had been irrevocably altered. I fell in love somewhere near the North Pole one afternoon while kicking back at 35,000 feet. It was sudden, [...]
The twenty-two-year-old Richard Wagner composed this dramatic overture as part of the incidental music for a play about the explorer, written by the composer's friend, Guido Theodore Apel. Wagner also wrote a chorus and orchestral epilogue for the play, but these have been lost. At its premier the music “astonished everyone and was tumultuously applauded," [...]
We should see the nations of the world as distinct and beautiful flowers in the garden of culture. It is the love of this uniqueness of each nation which should inspire all lovers of national integrity to fight against the globalized monoculture that the globalist Imperium wishes to impose… In his essay “Towards Patriotism: An [...]
Our real culture wars are not being waged between “God and country” conservatism on the one side and multicultural secular liberalism on the other. It now seems to me that our real culture wars are waged between Civil Religion on the one side and Christian orthodoxy on the other. At our 2009 annual meeting, the [...]
The liturgy properly offered in a suitable building offers a harmonization of the arts and culture as no other human experience can do... On Advent Sunday last year, we dedicated the new church in our small parish in South Carolina. The impact of worshipping in a beautiful temple rather than a fan-shaped suburban auditorium is [...]
A.G. Sertillanges sees the intellectual life as essentially a vocation, and in the most spiritual sense of the word. It is, as he says, “a sacred call.” “More than ever before thought is waiting for men, and men for thought. The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims. We are in a train rushing [...]
Truth, beauty, and goodness are the terms by which we understand the whole of reality and the terms that give coordinates to all of human life. And so, if you want to live well, you need to know what truth, goodness, and beauty are… I sat down with James Matthew Wilson over a beer after his [...]
The nexus between the Straussians and neoconservatives has been overstated for partisan ends, but it is still nonetheless there. Sociologically and culturally, the two movements are largely indistinguishable… The Truth About Leo Strauss by Catherine and Michael Zuckert (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In The Truth About Leo Strauss, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, both professors holding [...]
You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease, Within this region I subsist, Whose spirits falter in the mist, And languish for the purple seas. […]
Every person we meet in ordinary, daily affairs is part human and part divine, a storytelling self, often confused, dislikable, and in pain, but always transient; and a mysterious self, deathless, an image of God, worthy of unconditional love… The Buddha, at the age of thirty-five, preached his first sermon to five ascetics, his old [...]
The tragedy is not that the Russian Revolution is being forgotten; it’s that it is being remembered in the wrong way. It is being seen through rose-coloured spectacles, its grim reality being smothered in layers of romantic myth… This month is the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most important moments in modern [...]
What ideology ever threatened America more than Islamic extremism? And yet might Islam, which once helped save and preserve Western thought and culture a thousand years ago, do something similar this century, helping to bring us back to a more spiritual, less materialistic, epoch?… 1938. The world is on the threshold of the most devastating war [...]
In America, we have taken the happy childhood, which encouraged children to be independent explorers, and instead cultivated petulant, incapable, and safeguarded children… When it comes to children’s stories, an old favorite of mine is The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett. Being a classic, many will know that the story revolves around three children who discover a long-abandoned [...]
It is a small step from the charters and constitutions of the Medieval Church to our own Declaration of Independence… The civilization of the West is rendered an intelligible unit and distinguished from the alternatives by three characteristics present nowhere else: monotheism in religion, philosophy, and science as a means for understanding the natural world, [...]