Learning Wisdom in the Midst of Reversals
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 24 […]
Restoring Our Constitutional Morality
Our cultural unwritten constitution has been damaged by decades of conflict and abuse. It will not be restored through adoption of one or even several reforms. Nor will our operational constitution be “fixed” through even fundamental changes in formal law. Lacking an appropriate constitutional morality, those who govern will continue to do so through quasi-law, [...]
Can a Conservative Embrace Romanticism?
Undoubtedly trying to shock many of his readers—most of whom understandably associated him with radicalism in poetry and the Bloomsbury group in London—T.S. Eliot exclaimed rather baldly in the late 1920s, “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” […]
The Evil of America’s Polarization
Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, observed that the American soldiers who committed atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison were not inherently evil: “The line between good and evil is permeable. Any of us can move across it… I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil—to be [...]
Why the Critics Are Attacking “Ben-Hur”
The new Ben-Hur is a terrific movie. It is exciting, suspenseful, filled with clashes of spirit, interest, and personality, and offers a story of brotherly love, conflict, revenge, and redemption. Religious faith and the spirit of forgiveness are at its core, though not front and center. It is precisely the kind of movie people in [...]
A New Political Party for Conservatives?
The policies of the American Solidarity Party come as a breath of much-needed fresh air in the stale and suffocating atmosphere of contemporary politics. I was greatly heartened to read Paul Gottfried’s excellent essay in The Imaginative Conservative in which he lambasts so-called “conservatives” for their abandonment of all that has always been meant by [...]
On the Deaths of Plato and Eric Voegelin
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Fr. James Schall as he contemplates the similarities between the death of Plato and the death of one of Plato’s more recent scholars, Eric Voegelin. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and [...]
“An Introduction to Literature”
Look: No one ever promised for sure that we would sing. We have decided to moan. In a strange dance that we don’t understand till we do it, we have to carry on. […]
Does the Church Oppose the Free Market?
It’s quite easy to forgive those who experience an attack of nausea upon hearing the phrase “Catholic Social Thinking.” In light of the misuse from which that phrase has suffered over the past half-century alternative responses are all too likely to indicate either that a person has not been paying attention or is lacking in [...]
The Wild Goodness of Architect Antoni Gaudí
Once I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a large book sitting on a table. Its cover was a detail photograph of a roof corner. I was caught immediately, like love at first sight. A detail of a roof was all it took to make me a life-long fan of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, the [...]
Time for a Christian Declaration of Independence?
All that is needed for a happy divorce between God and Caesar is for the leaders of Christian churches to make a declaration of independence from the power of the state. One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to believe that holy matrimony has anything whatsoever to do with a secular understanding [...]
The Law of the Jungle
You might wonder where this phrase comes from—the law of the jungle—which we take to mean lawlessness, spelled out in a fine turn of phrase. Rudyard Kipling thought otherwise; in fact, he makes quite a lot in a book for kids about something serious. Jungle is another name for forest. It is the world in [...]
Will the Clinton Foundation Scandal Go Away?
Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, [...]
Why Is the Media So Liberal?
I recall seeing a political cartoon that contrasted the way the media treated Tim Tebow versus how it treated Jason Collins, the first openly-homosexual NBA player. It depicted Tebow saying: “I’m a Christian,” and the reporter turns his back to him and walks away muttering: “Keep it to yourself.” Next to that picture, Collins is [...]