To engage in dialogue, we must be good listeners, seeking to hear an insight, perhaps fuzzily formulated and unclear even to the speaker, but nevertheless worthy of exploration. Every culture has its own conversational style that often inhibits genuine dialogue. In Japan, for instance, the division of scholars and scientists at universities and research institutes [...]
Words are not static. They are dynamic. Like the birth of a child, there remains always something mysterious, even miraculous, about the birth of a thought and about the words we use to bring that thought into being. Perhaps Johnny Mercer has already and long ago settled the gentlemanly epistemological debate that has emerged between [...]
Both the Boy Scouts of America announcement and the #metoo phenomenon indicate a cultural problem: We have difficulty understanding the role distinctions play in our interactions with one another… “The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society.”[1] Richard Weaver penned these words in his 1948 book, Ideas [...]
Edmund Burke’s greatest service to liberty was to remind the world that freedom is anchored in a transcendent moral order and that for liberty to flourish, social and personal order and morality must exist, and radical innovations must be shunned… Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is rightly renowned as the father of conservatism. In this bicentennial year of [...]
If anything identifies a conservative, it is his realistic appraisal of human nature—his appreciation of what is good and admirable, and his recognition of what is base. As some renditions of American history would have it, the conservative pedigree in the United States begins with, or at the very least includes, Alexander Hamilton and his [...]
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With [...]
What matters most profoundly to the student of history is the revelations about God (sovereign), the created order (good), and humanity (fallen). If a person knows nothing but the first three chapters of Genesis, he will have, at least, a semblance of understanding of the human condition… While the ancient Hebrews were not the first [...]
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” is far more powerful than William Wordsworth’s pondering and wandering on the banks of the Wye because Hopkins did not turn away from the dark reality… In England for a family celebration, we drove from Herefordshire down the beautiful Wye Valley stopping at the “bare ruined choir” of Tintern [...]
Do we really want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth as it was heard at its premiere? Do we want to listen to fifty unevenly trained musicians, playing on weak instruments that are hard to play, in an unheated concert hall, conducted by a deaf man on one rehearsal? Or do you want to experience what the [...]
Just as the good philosopher needs to be a master of the Christian philosophical tradition and adept at the dialectical, analytical, synthetic, and imaginative skills with which his trade is plied, the good Christian college also requires a rigorous and sophisticated curriculum and pedagogy firmly rooted in the Christian philosophical tradition... As Alasdair MacIntyre has [...]
A straightforward reading of Michel Houellebecq’s book shows that the author wants to consider the possibility that religion—not spiritualism, not some kind of therapeutic deism, but true, practiced, day-to-day religion—soothes our longings and grants us some measure of peace and satisfaction, a measure withheld by secular liberalism… Submission: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq (Groupe Flammarion, 2015) [...]
Winston Churchill, who is the subject of Martin Gilbert’s book, comes out of it all a towering public figure—an inspiring wartime leader who never lost his confidence in the darkest hours of the war, a man of enormous vitality and energy, unsparing of himself, but who never lost an opportunity to enjoy what life had [...]
The modern university’s idea of “diversity” excludes all dissident opinions to the one accepted definition of “diversity” which it “values”… We live in strange and ominous times in which coherence and cohesiveness have been replaced by newspeak and doublethink. As readers of George Orwell’s 1984 will know, newspeak is the corruption of language, and therefore [...]
The left is politicizing our calming safety-valve institutions—the national anthem, marriage, statues, even leisure—damning them as expressions of an oppressive regime that must be overthrown. But these institutions need to be defended in order to relieve the pressures that are mounting and tearing society apart… If there is an image that represents the present state [...]