High Art is not going away. There are people who require an art of greater complexity than popular culture usually affords them, who hunger for something deeper, more complex, something that reflects the human experience… There is nothing more American than the Three Stooges throwing a pie in the face of a soprano warbling “Voices [...]
In Modernity, the capacity for effortless knowing is denied, ignored, or misunderstood. As a result, the origin of all knowledge is taken as unaided human effort and activity. The Two Modes of the Mind If we lack a word for an experience, we obviously cannot talk to others about it, and the experience, no matter [...]
If we truly desire the Benedict Option, then let us not withdraw from modernity, for strategic retreats easily turn into routs. Let us rather engage our neo-barbarian culture by both cultivating our Benedictine identity while also projecting Saint Boniface’s strength. It is the only option. Scratch the soul of many a conservative and beneath you [...]
Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines […]
Our support for health, education, and welfare must take some form other than support for state systems that serve intrinsically destructive goals… To what extent should Christians support an essentially evil government? The question is unaccustomed. The Church views government as natural and necessary, and she normally favors obedience even to tyrannical governments as long [...]
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ in-depth study of nature itself and his reality-based Scotist philosophy manifested in a poetry that penetrates to the heart of beauty and unlocks that gash, that gush, that glimpse of glory for the mortal reader. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, by Paul Mariani (512 pages, Viking, 2008) There can be no better biographer [...]
Trying to put science in a classical paradigm is putting new wine into old wineskins. Modern science just does not easily fit into a classical paradigm… STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and math, is the newest acronym for what is considered a great education, and it often leads to a satisfying and financially rewarding career [...]
Taken together, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton might not be a holy trinity but they are certainly a holy triumvirate enabling us to see the world with rooted clarity and childlike wisdom. One of the most interesting and spontaneously thought-provoking questions that I’ve ever been asked in an interview was asked by an [...]
C.S. Lewis’ assent and ascent to Christianity would be laborious and always deeply intellectual, guided and influenced by Catholicism even as the Romanists repulsed him. “Outside a life of literary study, life has no meaning or attraction for him,” W. T. Kirkpatrick, C.S. Lewis’s tutor, informed his father. “He is adapted for nothing else. You [...]
Join host Steve Allen as he welcomes Cleopatra, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine, and Theodore Roosevelt to a discussion of questions of enduring significance. Topics include the merits and evils of imperialism, the American Revolution, the possibility of nobility in war, certitude of religious doctrine, and the best form of government. Hear Cleopatra and Aquinas react [...]
Prudence is at the heart of the conservative disposition toward the world, and prudence calls us to laugh with conscience, recognizing that laughter can just as easily undermine goodness as it can affirm and celebrate that goodness. And lest this sound like a mood-dampening admonishment, let us also remember that the only true festival is [...]
"If others play the fool, it is no reason why you should. The State will take care of itself. Mind your own business as you have heretofore done, and every thing will be better for yourself and for the State. There are men whose vocation it is, from taste, habit, and education, to be statesmen, [...]
Fine art does not set out to entertain. Instead, fine art seeks to summon one to worship, for contemplation of God’s control, authority, and presence is indeed worship… Before the world was digitized and messaging was made instant via the ubiquity of supercomputers carried in each person’s pocket or purse, written communication was facilitated by [...]
Plutarch’s writing combines the comfortable, gossipy moralizing of Livy with the precise rhetorical calibration of Tacitus, and the result sparks with human insight unmatched by any other writer of the ancient world except the Greek tragedians… Bard College classicist James Romm, author of memorably good books such as Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court [...]