The Movement of World Revolution by Christopher Dawson (The Catholic University of America Press) Having witnessed the loss of an idyllic Edwardian world to the deadening trenches of the first world war, the rise of communism and the gulag state in Slavic Europe and China, and the advent of national socialism and the holocaust camps in [...]
When, in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” and, “Your children will live under communism,” Eisenhower’s America scoffed. By 1980, however, the tide did indeed seem to be with the East. America had suffered a decade of defeats. Southeast Asia had fallen. The ayatollah had seized power in Iran. Moscow had occupied [...]
Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer Featured Book: Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the key to history;” therefore “[w]e cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion.” To understand Europe and the West, then, [...]
President Obama A forthcoming book by Vali Nasr, who is Dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, paints a tragic picture of President Obama and the Afghan debacle. Dr. Vasr worked closely with the late and unsuccessful envoy Richard Holbooke, summarised in Foreign Policy, where Mr Obama makes [...]
On Tuesday, March 19, Catholics will celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph, in honor of which I would like to submit the following brief reflections on the meaning of work as craft: 1. Work is not meant to be worship in what Matthew B. Crawford calls the “cult of the sovereign self”; rather, work is [...]
[For Gail, 3-16-2013] Fifty and four you are today I see the years cascading now Rather than ache and slowly crawl They used to do the latter, no? Or was it just a youthful gaze That saw the years as enemies Not friends, be casual or close Today of layers I’m aware Layers as in [...]
An author too robust and significant to be wholly un-personned can still be marginalized. Consider this elegant pasquinade, which years ago won a parody-contest award in Britain’s New Statesman and which employs the same rhyme scheme and meter as Hilaire Belloc’s own “The chief defect of Henry King”: The chief defect of dear Hilaire Was [...]
It is easy to forget that tolerance was not original to the Enlightenment. After all, this is the narrative handed to us by most scholars and pundits. We forget that during the Reformation entire regions and cities like Alsace, Ravensburg, Lausanne, and Augsburg developed types of bi-confessionalism, where different confessions shared civic power and public [...]
Abraham Lincoln Harry Jaffa says Jack Kemp and I have been conducting an “uncivil war” over Abraham Lincoln’s character. Well, for my part, I deny it. Kemp called me one of the current “assassins of Lincoln’s character,” which I thought was a little rabid, inasmuch as I had given Lincoln praise as well [...]
From the Christian perspective, the Logos is the beginning, the middle, and the end of time and history, and history itself is a reflection of the Logos. Each person—from Adam to the last person—is a finite reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Image of God, an incarnate soul. In the stunningly poetic prologue [...]
So lots of readers (about six) have written me asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around. Here’s my recommendation: Lost in the Cosmos by the philosopher-physician-novelist Walker Percy. It was published in 1983, and I’m one of the very few Americans celebrating the book’s 30th anniversary. Several posts will [...]
A few days ago I decided to put together an anecdotal word-picture of what life was like in the United States in 1913, mostly to amuse my grandchildren. My grandfather Willson’s cousin Gertrude was keeping an occasional diary during that period, primarily to record the astonishing changes that seemed to be taking place in every [...]
On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing by James V. Schall Ever since God commanded His creation to rest, humans have managed to busy themselves to near oblivion. James Schall has long been recognized as one of the great masters of the essay. In his most recent collection of [...]
A conservative in every sense of the term, Charles Gayarré mourned the passing of the aristocratic society of the Old South and was never able to reconcile himself to the egalitarian mores of post-war America. The roles of romantic historian and biting satirist perfectly suited him, for he looked back nostalgically to the past and [...]