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, [...]
In educating for democracy, we must also educate for economy. This follows from the fundamental truth that government and economy have an indivisible relationship. We are not free to mix any form of government with any economic form. In the present context, we will apply this truth to three possible visions of economy: the globalist, [...]
Richard Weaver Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that [...]
The Devil’s first sin was not the temptation of Eve, but preceded the creation of the Garden. He “tried to destroy by violence before he succeeded in ruining by fraud.” You might like to compare Tolkien’s “Ainulindale” (the Elvish account of the creation of the world through music, in The Silmarillion), with the following meditation on the Exercises [...]
Dear New Sophomore, I would call you by your first name, but I haven’t met you yet. I will, in about a week, and then I really need to know your name, because it is important to call people by their names. In fact, I am so excited to know who you are, I want [...]
An elderly woman picks up a telephone and a strange voice says, Remember you must die. “Who is that speaking, who is it?” the elderly Dame Lettie demands, but the caller, “as on eight previous occasions,” has already hung up. So who is it that is calling and saying these foreboding words to the cast of [...]
Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 In philosophy, religion, politics, and other arenas of communal life, we are confronted with choices between radical contraries. We can choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche (according to Alasdair MacIntyre); we can choose between God and Mammon (as Jesus instructs in the Sermon on the Mount), or, as [...]
In 1962, historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn shocked the academic world with his book The Structures of Scientific Revolution. He asserted that scientific communities are closed-minded and promote convergent thinking as a function of dogma in scientific work. The jolt is that science is popularly thought of as promoting divergent thinking and open-minded inquiry. Kuhn concedes [...]
“What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner. But, if you cannot read them, at any rate handle and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. [...]
March 1, 2012, marked the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. In 1912 400 eminent writers, journalists, editors, social reformers, university presidents, and public men, including William Howard Taft, who had altered his schedule to attend, crowded Sherry’s restaurant in New York City to celebrate Howells’s 75th birthday. From England, Thomas Hardy and Henry [...]
While our political and cultural elites debate about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, it may be worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask what truly is at stake here. My sense is that the debate about illegal immigration–as well as over topics like same-sex marriage or national [...]
“Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true good? Have they found the remedy for our ills? Is man’s pride cured by placing him on an equality with God?”— Pascal, Pensēes, #430. “Salvation, such as it shall [...]
Willa Cather On Sunday, August 11, 2013, my family and I began our now-yearly odyssey into the West. As I write this, our vacation is ending, and I’m typing this from the second floor of a rented house in the Rockies, looking across my laptop out the window at Mt. Ouray. In two [...]
Shakespeare “It was William of Occam,” writes Richard Weaver in his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences, “who propounded the fateful idea of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.” Weaver compares this development in the intellectual history of Western man to Macbeth’s ominous meeting with the Weird Sisters: “Have we forgotten our [...]