About Cicero Bruce

Dr. Cicero Bruce is Professor of English at Dalton State College. He is the author of W.H. Auden’s Moral Imagination and author of the introduction to the new edition of Crowd Culture by Bernard Iddings Bell.

The Stand of Allen Tate

By |2023-10-06T06:40:58-05:00October 5th, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, Allen Tate, South, Southern Agrarians|

“No society is worth ‘saving’ as such,” wrote Allen Tate (1899–1979). “What we must save is the truth of God and man, and the right society follows.”1 Such words are anathema to the secularists whose “progressive” theories have intoxicated the modern mind. Words of this kind are neither popular nor politically expedient in an age [...]

Charles Williams in Letters & Remembrances

By |2023-06-02T18:10:49-05:00June 2nd, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Literature|

If there is one essential theme in Charles Williams’ writing, it is summed up in his favorite quotation from Julian of Norwich: “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensualities God is.” His wife recalled that their life together, from beginning to end, aspired to [...]

Defending the Permanent Things

By |2022-09-22T17:17:45-05:00September 22nd, 2022|Categories: Books, Classical Education, Culture, Education, Language, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) As [...]

The Ideal Teacher of Literature

By |2022-08-28T19:25:27-05:00August 28th, 2022|Categories: Literature, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

With his students, the ideal teacher of literature seeks the center of knowledge, which he understands in metaphysical or theological terms. His vehicle is poetry, by which he means the imaginative creation of action and character in either prose or verse. When they seek the center in communion with the greatest of poets, teacher and student [...]

Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination

By |2022-08-15T15:43:34-05:00August 15th, 2022|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Flannery O'Connor, Imagination|

Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O'Connor's protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, [...]

St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Two Very Different Biographies

By |2021-07-25T13:37:07-05:00July 24th, 2021|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity|

Biographies by Fr. Bernard Bro and and Kathryn Harrison give us two vivid depictions of St. Thérèse. Yet, attitudinally speaking, their accounts of this Christ-imitating, self-immolating woman of Lisieux have little in common. Thérèse of Lisieux made the first record of her life, and that record, written in obedience to her Carmelite superior, is the [...]

Four Roads to Rome

By |2021-01-21T15:11:41-06:00January 21st, 2021|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Flannery O'Connor, Literature|

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (554 pages, [...]

From Highest Heaven Handed Down

By |2020-09-28T16:33:34-05:00September 28th, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Natural Law, Philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas|

Russell Hittinger’s “The First Grace” deals mightily with the crisis of our time—namely, the failure of those who make, enjoy, and judge the constitutionality of laws to appreciate the dire consequences of denying the place of natural-law considerations in the ordering of public life. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, [...]

Between the Seen and Unseen

By |2020-08-20T11:24:21-05:00August 22nd, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Heaven, Philosophy, Science|

Heaven is an unreality for contemporary physicalists of all schools of thought who preach that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world can be explained solely in materialist terms. Yet for those who are open to the sacramental dimension of our diurnal existence, heaven is here, there, and everywhere. Paradise Mislaid: [...]

W.H. Auden’s Discovery of Original Sin

By |2020-08-03T17:01:58-05:00August 4th, 2020|Categories: Literature, Poetry, T.S. Eliot|Tags: , |

For several months after his 1939 immigration to the United States, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) remained enchanted with all the old dogmas—psychology, Marxism, and liberal humanism—that had shaped so much of his early work. As a poet, he continued to assert his faith in man’s ability to save civilization from ruin. Composed like all mankind “Of [...]

Joseph Conrad’s Imagination

By |2021-04-27T20:11:10-05:00July 15th, 2020|Categories: Books, George A. Panichas, Great Books, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination|

For Joseph Conrad, the struggle between good and evil in the human soul was a permanent reality, a reality one might prefer to avoid, or try to sublimate, but one that nobody who has lived long can absolutely deny. Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas (165 pages, Mercer University Press, 2005) In [...]

The Christian Moral Economy

By |2020-06-26T11:15:46-05:00June 20th, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Economics, Free Trade|

The contributors to “Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny” underscore the truth that liberal intellectuals who foster the illusions that God is dead, that man is self-sufficient, are but tools in the hands of the actual dominant force: global corporations that wield economic power, power that the liberal intellectuals unwittingly serve by providing corporate advertisers in [...]

Apostles to the Skeptic: C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church

By |2020-08-03T17:08:20-05:00June 6th, 2020|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Joseph Pearce|

Joseph Pearce’s “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church” presents a compelling case in suggesting that its subject evolved “into a very Catholic sort of Protestant.” Though C.S. Lewis never became a Roman Catholic, his later works betray a growing affinity for Catholic teaching. C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce (220 pages, [...]

The Ghost of Dickens Past

By |2020-05-22T15:13:51-05:00February 6th, 2020|Categories: Books, Charles Dickens, Conservatism, Literature|

Critics have well acquainted us with Charles Dickens the sentimentalist—lover of the oppressed, defender of childhood innocence, decrier of England’s industrial sweatshops. But seldom have they given readers a glimpse of the Dickens with whom Myron Magnet deals in “Dickens and the Social Order”: Dickens the philosophical traditionalist. Dickens and the Social Order, by Myron [...]

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