I was talking with a friend a few days ago, and he asked me what I thought about a particular news story. He was surprised when I responded that I knew a good bit less than he did about this story, and he seemed even more surprised as I was describing it with what he [...]
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” These are not Thomas Jefferson’s most famous words, but they are quite famous among students of politics. They have been used for generations to justify radical political change. And, like the soaring rhetoric of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, these Jeffersonian words have gained him great [...]
“Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”– Russell Kirk A year and a half ago, I had never heard the [...]
Peter Kreeft There are at least 19 different kinds of judgment that we should distinguish. I’m sorry I could not find a 20th, to match the number of digits on our fingers and toes. But 19 does match the digits of Frodo Baggins, one of my heroes. (I’m sure you remember Frodo of [...]
Our challenge is to show that human beings are truly involved in activities that transcend the restrictions of space, time, and matter, that we do accomplish things that are spiritual, and that therefore we are spiritual as well as material beings.—Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Soul and the Transcendence of the Human Person “The concept of mysticism,” the author [...]
In my recently released co-edited volume, A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, the contributors explore the politics and political thought of one of the seminal fiction writers of America. Exploring Saul Bellow’s politics and his thought on race, religion, gender, multiculturalism, as well as other aspects of modernity that pushed him into the conservative camp, [...]
Restoring Beauty: the Good, the True and the Beautiful in the Writings of C.S. Lewis, by Louis Markos Critical acclaim and popular interest has always accompanied the works of C.S. Lewis and his good friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, even from their first publications in the 1930’s and 1940’s. During the latter half of the century, interest ebbed [...]
Attorney General Eric Holder said that when it comes to the race debate, “we are a nation of cowards!” Indeed, on that single point he may find agreement even amongst some conservatives. How long will we stand idly by? How long must we tolerate the intolerable behavior of the race baiters terrorizing for tolerance? What [...]
The emergence of classical Christian education over the last few decades has thrown into relief the question of the relationship between public education and Christian witness. With ninety-percent of children in the U.S. attending public schools, the modern pulpit appears generally indifferent on the issue of private vs. public education for its parishioners; indeed, one [...]
It started soon after dawn as a Philo-Semitic waking dream; a minor fantasy teaching us to value what we have. By late morning it became the fully conscious nightmare of a second Shoah and how it might come to pass. As I woke too early and went back to sleep, it began to unfold. One [...]
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to disappear: the world, in truth, is more modern than ever. So we must contest Hegel’s assertion that the modern world is the end, the fulfillment, of history. The [...]
At 8 a.m. on August 29, as Dirk and Petra Wunderlich began the day’s homseschooling classes with their four children, a team of twenty armed special agents, social workers, and police with a battering ram stormed the family’s home in Darmstadt, Germany. The children were forcibly taken from their parents in a raid that was [...]
I have been rereading Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterful Democracy in America. This book, written in the first half of the nineteenth century by a French aristocrat for his countrymen, remains standard reading for American college students and even some of their professors. In a way it is too bad that we tend to read it [...]
The failure of the vampire is his failure to grasp the philosophy of the vampire. His “child brain” contains a powerful intellect, that power beguiles. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love letter, [...]