Lord Acton is the prophet who foresaw our times. He anticipated the dangers of statism. But ironically he is now a setting star—passé and remote. This, it must be said, is a tragedy of his own making. It’s a mystery why he never wrote his planned magnum opus… In late July, shortly before loading a [...]
There is a divine order of being of which we must be a part. To reject this order and our part therein is to choose madness and make any decent life impossible. As a literary critic, George Panichas shed great light on the relationship between this recognition of the order of being and our ability [...]
The Shakespeare scholar who crossed swords with C.S. Lewis describes Lewis in the early 1950s, at the height of his fame, as “a red-faced, egg-headed, portly, jolly, middle-aged man, who was (like Old King Cole) fond of his pipe and his glass of beer.” Father Peter Milward Father Peter Milward SJ, who died [...]
Though Christopher Dawson remained unsure why the Natural Law developed, he did not hesitate to celebrate it. He remained firmly convinced that the development of Natural Law did not randomly emerge from individual genius, but rather believed that individual genius arose out of the various traditions and norms of each people. As a historian and [...]
Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. […]
I tried to explain to the police officer that I hadn’t said anything to him, but the uproar around us was immense, but I could see the fear and the fury in his eyes and as his club came within an inch of my face, I sensibly turned silent… Like many others, I have had [...]
Logical positivism and countless similar philosophies have all eventually passed. Thus, it seems, that postmodernism will likely suffer the same fate. However, until that day arrives, let us be Cheerful Soldiers, emboldened by the knowledge of just how temporary those foundations are upon which philosophical fashions are rested… “The vogue of each particular maxim of [...]
The college student needs the virtue that enables him to see the origins, the first principles. He will do this by reading and conversing—even by prayer and fasting. Even students in religious-founded institutions can lose their faith, while others find God at Ohio State University. Some students mold themselves to the prevailing campus ideology, while [...]
The Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers hollowed Western culture out of the very spiritual body that held it together: the mystical body of Christ… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Wayne Allen as he explores Romano Guardini’s understanding of the dissolution of Western culture via the de-spiritualization of the West, [...]
The Author’s outcry against Octavianus Caesar Augustus as he contemplated Schleissen’s marble effigy of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Extemporaneous poem. He was an ingrate, more a barbarian, Marcus, then even the lictor, when he left you beneath some lictor’s ignominious blow. Octavianus was almost more deadly […]
The conduct of the tourists in Florence, as they aimed their smart phone cameras at one great work of art after another and quickly moved on, puzzled me. What was this strange behavior?… It was with mixed emotions that I anticipated a few days in Florence this summer. I had first visited the city thirty [...]
Flannery O’Connor’s fiction teaches us the need for charity toward other points of view, our personal tendency toward blindness, and the benefit of stories to enhance our vision… In 2014, I spoke at the American Embassy in Prague at a symposium on the civil rights movement in America. I made the mistake of offering Flannery O’Connor’s story [...]
The core of René Girard's thought seems to center around the fundamental conviction that mimetic desire is the desire for God. In a recent essay in this journal, Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski makes the bold claim that “the work of René Girard would not seem all that relevant to Thomists.... However, in my estimation, Girard’s thought [...]
What is needed in American today are not “hurricane men,” but calm representative figures spread throughout society, who by their example and integrity can lead a nation through the storm and accomplish great things… We have reached a point in our nation’s history where the debate is becoming ever more violent and uncivil. This can [...]