On July 6 in Warsaw, the President of the United States spoke with timeless eloquence about the need to defend the West against those who “threaten over time to undermine our individual freedom and sovereignty and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.” In the mid-nineteenth century, the [...]
Dear President Putin: It is no use trying any further to accommodate the United States or cooperate with it. We cannot afford any more concessions. It is clear that the United States only respects force and firmness. Dear Mr. President: The below memorandum regarding Russian-American bilateral relations was drafted by my Ministry’s Department of North [...]
The imagination is a gift from God, given in His own image, to conceive of a Glorious Reality that does exist, that we cannot yet fully see. Why is a sentence from C.S. Lewis delightful while an equally true statement by another, ordinary writer, is not? “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun [...]
Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. […]
“Forgetfulness of being”—perhaps we could also call it “forgetfulness of givenness”—underlies most of the problems that we face… Final exams (of blessed memory at this point) are always a way of getting students to pull together what they’ve read and thought about during the semester, but the best exams take that knowledge and guide it [...]
Jacob Klein was, first and last, every inch a teacher, a teacher who stymied discipleship in the very effort to induce learning. He did, indeed, have some teachings to convey—a few, though those were powerful and of large consequence. Editor’s Note: This essay was read as a tribute to philosopher and long-time tutor of St. [...]
Join Boris Johnson, Britain's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, as they debate the significance of the world's most timeless civilizations: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Mr. Johnson defends the culture, art, and philosophy of Ancient Greece, while Dr. Beard argues for the supremacy [...]
The story of the god of the gaps ends like a bad dream. The scientist has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries... Atheists have a [...]
The perennial moral that Wonder Woman learns is that evil, and the war which is one of its manifestations, can never be finally destroyed in human history… It’s been many years since I’ve been in the habit of watching films. It’s not because I’ve turned my back on the motion picture as an art form; [...]
Wendell Berry’s poetry sings with the love of a man for his home, enticing the reader to embrace his vision of local agrarian economy as sufficient for the good life. “From knowledge of the forest comes/at last knowledge of forestry:/what, without permanent damage,/can be spared and carefully removed,/leaving the whole forest whole. This learning/’takes decades. [...]
The ideal of the human under the aegis of something higher provides the strongest counter-pressure against the fragmentation and barbarization of our world… Editorial Note: The essay has been edited from an untitled, undated transcript of a lecture which Richard Weaver delivered to a meeting of the Newman Club at the University of Chicago shortly [...]
Star Wars is an icon of the modern idol of distraction that has become the destiny of a generation of lost souls. Modernity’s enchantment with the film is rooted in a religious hunger for transcendence—but God has been left off the modern menu. And the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the [...]
“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.” Editor’s Note: In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis [...]
Please join Peter Kalkavage as he discusses the metaphysics of music: music's role in the liberal arts, the paradox in the union of rational and irrational, order and feeling in its composition, and music's connection and reflection of the deeper order of the natural world, of being. Introduction: In this podcast, we hear from Peter [...]