Modern England is so secular in her orientation and so narcissistic in her hedonism that she treats her own heritage with scornful and supercilious neglect. This was made painfully clear to me this January when I returned to my native land to film a documentary on the great Catholic poet, Francis Thompson. Described by Chesterton [...]
When Edmund Burke surveyed the names of those leading the French Revolution in its first half year of existence in 1789, he despaired. Several were certainly good men, he noted, and many were quite accomplished. Yet, not a single man possessing any necessary experience in the world appeared on the list. “The best,” he lamented, [...]
American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, [...]
There’s a chilling image from my youth that I’ve never been able to scrub out of my mind. It might not seem at first glance to amount to much. It was a blue spiral spray-painted on our street, a sort of insect with enormous eyes, with a caption suggesting LSD. In those days, the newspapers [...]
One of the toughest things about living in America is the relative absence of the presence of the past. In England one is immersed in the past to such a degree that it is all too easy to forget that it’s there or to take it for granted. I once lived in a tiny cottage [...]
I have now sat through my mandatory Title IX training, which is to say I spent ninety minutes in an Orwellian swamp of doublespeak, barely hidden bigotry, and will to power, decreed by the Obama Administration and enthusiastically carried out by a combination of mid-level administrators and high-paid legal “experts.” For those of you blissfully unaware [...]
Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. […]
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation. —St. Thomas Aquinas The trouble with mere pragmatism is that it doesn’t work. —G.K. Chesterton What is education? I emphasize “is” because I am not here asking what education is thought to be, or what [...]
Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” and as usual he was right. It was an empire and it was evil. But must an empire always be evil? […]
“There’s Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood a-Tingle” —The New York Times Book Review (Sep 16, 1962) “I’d willingly start my next novel—about a small town—right now, but I need the diversion of a play.” —John O’Hara, The New York Times Book Review (Nov 27, 1955) “For most of our lifetime civil war [...]
It is September that carries with it the final judgment for many baseball teams, and at times it is one particular play that decides a team’s destiny. “April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land, but for baseball fans it is the month of September that marks [...]
A poignant passage in Immaculée Ilibagiza’s book Left to Tell recounts how her father, a proud and prominent Tutsi in their village, resisted leaving Rwanda in the spring of 1994, shortly before the genocide. The signs of brewing violence were becoming increasingly obvious, but Ilibagiza’s father was determined to be a sign of hope for [...]
Albert Jay Nock believed that the Jeffersonian project depended on the improvability of citizens through education, but that the ordinary mass of humans simply could not be so improved. In Zen Buddhism, the lineage of student to master is extremely important—it is the channel through which the Dharma is transmitted. There is a story of [...]
Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books [...]