The agency driving the threefold development of the Oresteia is human effort in partnership with divine purpose. The Athena of the third play provides the executive, personal agent who, in founding a polity, gives over divine to human providence. The great question provoked by the trilogy is the question of assigning ultimate causality, since from [...]
Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives, edited by John A. Murley and John E. Alvis; foreword by William F. Buckley, Jr., 2002. Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) remains one of the most important figures in mid-twentieth century conservatism. His penetrating scholarship on Locke, his writings on the internal tensions inherent in majority rule, his early involvement with [...]
Excerpts from The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism, by John Zmirak Q: Okay, so we’ve worked our way through the uncounted millennia between the emergence of man and the first glimmers of revelation, then the six-thousand-something years it took God to gradually tease out what he had in mind for mankind. On the face [...]
Your Eminence, I pray that this finds you well. You may recall that when we met at the cathedral before I left to visit America, you asked that I write to Your Eminence through my beloved elder brother, Fr. Adebayo Francis, with occasional observations. The Lord has blessed me with a safe journey and this [...]
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the Constitution, upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the “ACA” or “Obamacare”) as a valid [...]
Shackled to deadlines or deep in the stacks, The patron of editors, writers and hacks, And all the good work that their labour entails, Is the Genovese bishop, Saint Francis de Sales. Convivial, mystical, pious and skint, God’s love was the liquor he poured into print; In the Great Reformation he did rather much (While [...]
In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Today I propose to honor the memory of a famous man, a man who earned his fame by writing about those who, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, were our fathers. In the great chain of being [...]
Ellis Sandoz In my previous post about Eric Voegelin, I wrote how Voegelin became a model of thinking devoid of ideological rant in the student’s quest for the true, the beautiful, and the good. One of those students was Ellis Sandoz, who in turn became a master teacher himself in the mold of Eric Voegelin. [...]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But what is “best” for some is “worst” for others, and vice-versa. Monday, President Obama was sworn in for his second term. This event was a “best” for his stalwart supporters, such as Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and is a sign of a [...]
Albert Jay Nock made famous the device called the Oxometer which is “a device to be installed wherever there is conversation or oratory going on, and the idea is that it automatically separates the bull from the solid substance of the discourse, leaving the latter as a residuum.” If Nock were alive today to use [...]
One of the more interesting arguments one hears these days from gun control advocates is that “there is no good reason” for anyone to own an “assault rifle” (or high volume ammunition clip). Sounds logical, no? What possible reason could one have for owning such a weapon, capable of killing so many people so quickly, [...]
Ronald Reagan's 1981 speech Today many Americans heard the inauguration speech of President Obama. Perhaps it would be beneficial to compare his speech to that of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Which is more inspiring? Which speech better represents the aspirations of the citizens of the American Republic? Books on President Ronald Reagan [...]
Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World by Robert P. Kraynak To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent….Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a Christian society should [...]
Downton Abbey cast So what will you be doing Sunday night? My advice: Watch more TV! Now you innovative and disruptive TIC readers might think you don’t have the time. But that’s only because you’ve forgotten about “multitasking.” Professors, for example, can be watching while grading papers and filling out assessment rubrics. Some [...]