Did you know that the man who co-wrote "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Cosi fan tutte" died as an American college professor? "Seldom, if ever indeed, has a more interesting personality come to these shores from Europe." —Joseph Russo, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Poet and Adventurer Opera aficionados will know Lorenzo Da Ponte's name [...]
Throughout history, poetry has been inextricably interwoven with praise. This being so, let’s take a lightning tour of the major poets of civilization. Beginning in the pre-Christian era we see how the poets of Athens and Jerusalem prepared the way for the coming of Christ with their creative gifts. Homer invoked his Muse, the divine [...]
The making of an industrialized society will extinguish the meaning of the arts, as humanity has known them in the past, by changing the conditions of life that have given art a meaning. For they have been produced in societies which were for the most part stable, religious, and agrarian; where the goodness of life [...]
Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of “We the People” by Randy Barnett (Northampton, MA: Broadside Books, 2016) Ostensibly a work on constitutional history and proper constitutional interpretation, Randy Barnett’s, Our Republican Constitution, is actually theory disguised as history. He argues that the Founders, through the Declaration of Independence, grounded our constitutionalism on the [...]
Thomas Jefferson was one of the architects of the American political system. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, helped to shape Constitutional interpretation, and was a virtual wellspring of the ideas on which the foundation of the United States was laid. While his knowledge of history and government was profound, the [...]
A little more than a year ago, I had the chance to talk with an extremely intelligent and talented scholar, one who had justly won a number of major awards. As we began to talk rather civilly over coffee and tea about our understandings of modern academia, this person said with some exasperation after I told [...]
To read “Mrs. Dalloway” is to re-experience the full violence of war inflicted on body and soul and mind and to comprehend the ravages of cruel history… The British writer, C.E. Montague (1867–1929) poignantly describes this debasing process in an acclaimed book that appeared in 1922, Disenchantment. To read Montague’s text regarding his own personal [...]
The cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all. It is not about “liberating” or empowering the victim, but about safeguarding resources. It is not about “progress” or “equality” but about conservation and equilibrium. Its following may be young and dishevelled; but that is largely because people in suits have [...]
It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the leveling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if [...]
My reading is extremely deep and wide; And as our modern education goes— Unique I think, and skilfully applied To Art and Industry and Autres Choses Through many years of scholarly repose. But there is one thing where I disappoint My numerous admirers (and my foes). Painting on Vellum is my weakest point. [...]
Allen Tate’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand poses a challenge. He concludes his “Remarks on Southern Religion” by stating that the way the Southerner can “take hold of his tradition” is by violence. In a group of essays that has eschewed a direct, political solution to the damaging cultural effects of industrialism, Tate challenges [...]
Few films of the new century have so forcefully posed major religious questions as has Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life of 2011. While following a near archetypical mid-American family’s quotidian joys and tragedies, the work ranges from the epic in scale to the intimate in its focus. In a manner of speaking, it simultaneously draws [...]
Let us now see how far the American constitution, both written and unwritten, accords with these principles; and how strongly prepared the American constitutional order may be to withstand powerful challenges in the dawning years. […]
“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.” G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, August 17, 1918 The problem with the world in which we find ourselves is that it exists on the level of platitude. People no longer think, they merely regurgitate what they’ve been taught. Thus, for instance, all thoroughly [...]