Bruce Timm’s Batman is a critical marker for modern Western civilization, reminding us that the war is always worth waging, even in the twilight… Bruce Timm Twenty-five years ago, on September 5, 1992, a very young Bruce Timm aired the first episode of a self-contained but what would become an expansive universe, now [...]
The greatest tragedy of America’s past is that racism was present not only in its worst villains, but also in some of its greatest public figures. We cannot debase the positive contributions of those who had moral failings, but we also cannot idolize the American Founders under the false pretension that vice did not exist [...]
Man's ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.... The capacity to perceive [...]
Lance Banning’s portrayal of James Madison as a son of the Virginia piedmont, consistent advocate of states’ rights, and strict constructionist does much to aid our understanding of the Father of the Constitution. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic by Lance Banning (Cornell University Press, 1995) Historians [...]
It all began as one of those Friday afternoon projects that medical researchers sometimes do to satisfy curiosity. No one expected it to work. The researchers were testing medieval medical remedies by replicating a 1000-year-old recipe for an eye salve. They were prepared to see it prove that medieval medicine was backward and even superstitious. [...]
A democratic society requires an informed base of voters making political judgments on the basis of commonly accepted information. When reliable authorities no longer hold sway, unscrupulous authoritarians can step in to fill the void… “We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts. A republic will not [...]
Edmund Burke, like his Whig forebears, believed in the existence of a higher moral law to which all valid positive law must conform, a universal law which manifests itself in diverse concrete forms, in the great variety of legal codes and customs that constitute particular cultural traditions. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the “ancient [...]
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky of this black August. My sister, the sun, broods in her yellow room and won’t come out. […]
Our situation is a gift, for God will give each of us who ask for it the grace to endure the darkness, barbarism, and loss of our customary sensible and cultural signs of God’s love and presence… Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideology can see clearly what has [...]
Historical sources often present the Holocaust as the logical conclusion of traditional Catholic anti-Judaism; the pope should be demonized because he headed an institution that was the source of the hatred of Jews. Is this accusation fair? Few episodes in recent Church history arouse as much attention as the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII [...]
I’ve recently taught a course on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work which, for all its flaws, continues to grip the popular imagination. What is it about this novel by a teenage girl, written two hundred years ago, that continues to fascinate us? Is the secret of Frankenstein’s success its grappling with timeless questions about the [...]
Abraham Lincoln did all that he could to preserve constitutional rule by trying to teach his fellow citizens what it means to be an American. The paradox of Abraham Lincoln’s appearance in the United States’ sectional conflict becomes manifest if one considers a passage written by James Madison in Federalist No. 10. In that paper, [...]
Art can be a sort of sacrament of the visible, effecting in itself the transfiguration of the world, and manifesting this to transform our attentive senses, hearts, and minds… Art, like philosophy, begins with wonder. Nothing is so surprising as that things exist. Henri Matisse wrote: “One must know how to maintain childhood’s freshness upon [...]
What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players, busy in their everyday lives, to spend a week in a far-off place and inundate themselves in practice and education concerning a single piece of music and its composer—the sort of exercise usually reserved for professionals. […]