Friendship is a precious jewel, and Aristotle was right in viewing it as having the luminous glow of virtue. But what should be said of “holy friendship” rooted in Christ, sharing in His love for the loved one? Those blessed by grace, who live up to the Christian canons of friendship, will have a taste [...]
I urge good men everywhere to read "The Woman Who was Poor" by Léon Bloy, a master of the art of darkness, which shows the ugliness of sin and illustrates its destructive consequences. His novel is indeed a masterpiece of the genre. It is said that all is necessary for the triumph of evil is [...]
It can be dangerous to depict evil. Accuracy might require getting too close to things best kept at bay. J.R.R. Tolkien once cautioned his friend, C.S. Lewis, concerning Mr. Lewis’ skill in depicting evil. Anyone familiar with Uncle Screwtape or Perelandra’s Un-man will know to what Mr. Tolkien alluded. There is an uncanny comprehension of [...]
The Class of 2023 can overcome its overwhelming challenges by admiring those eternal and permanent Christian ideals that have always enthralled generations. Those who generously give themselves to what they admire and love find meaning and purpose. Indeed, the overwhelmed class of 2023 can become overwhelming by becoming a shining beacon of faith and hope [...]
Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]
We can give those things God has asked, Fr. Leonard Klein asserted, for “He has not abandoned us; he has given us life and gifts in this place and this time, for this place and time.” The attentive reader will find that his sermons are a great aid to thinking through what holy living means [...]
John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the great exponents of the Southern political tradition, knew that what was proper to any state government was the preservation of the received order. The duty of the citizen of the commonwealth was to resist any legislative or constitutional changes to the received order, and to grant a broad [...]
Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]
There is nothing like the kinetic energy of live actors treading the boards to excite the mind’s passion. That is why we cannot leave the theater to its decline. The political implications of its failure are serious ones. Did anybody catch this year’s Tony Awards? I thought so. Actually, I didn’t watch the whole thing [...]
It just may be the case that the only real and meaningfully hope of the recovery of the liberal arts lies in the recovery of the gospel itself, and in the recovery of a Christian understanding of God, man, and the world—including a recovery of what education truly is. “One ought not grow old in [...]
Does “Paradise Lost” succeed as a poem qua poem, but not as a didactic theological poem? If we lived four hundred year earlier, might we suggest Milton pit Satan primarily against St. Gabriel or St. Michael? The concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian are famously invoked by Nietzsche in the context of Greek drama, but not [...]
Of all the music of the world, Western classical music is distinctive by virtue of its complexity, both technical and emotional, and for projecting a compelling sense of drama and narrative. In it we hear nothing less than the human soul reflected through the medium of sound. When thinking or writing about Western classical music, [...]
In classical education, we are not talking about tradition as the acquisition of monuments, but as a permanence gathered from moments of participation capable of being lived and lived again and then passed on to be taken up yet again by generations yet to come, with our own additions and our own achievements of greatness. [...]
Alexander Salter’s "The Political Economy of Distributism" is a much-needed scholarly work on the ideas of distributism, as presented in the writings of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Written in such a way that it will pass muster in the ivory towers of academe, it is also accessible for any reader interested in politics and [...]