About Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks is an independent writer from Lisbon, Ohio, who has written for Human Events, The Washington Times, The University Bookman, The Acton Institute’s journal-Religion and Liberty, the Southern Partisan, and many other publications.

Nothing But Glory Gained: Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg

By |2023-07-03T08:54:41-05:00July 2nd, 2020|Categories: Civil War, History, Robert Cheeks, Robert E. Lee, South|

On that summer-hot afternoon at Gettysburg, after two days of fighting in the summer-lush Pennsylvania countryside, the fate of two nations still hung in the balance. General Robert E. Lee intended to tip the scales. Just before 3 o’clock on the morning of July 3, 1863, Robert E. Lee rose by starlight, ate a spartan [...]

That Is What Love Is

By |2015-04-05T18:43:36-05:00April 5th, 2015|Categories: Christianity, Love, Robert Cheeks|

Love, I think, is a primary component in the metaleptic phenomenon of being and Eternal Being within the tension of existence. It is the experiential insight that gives succor to man’s deformed yearning (sehnsucht) for perfection in life, and it reveals to us that “God can not be contained within reason, because what he does [...]

The Philosophy of War and Peace

By |2019-08-13T17:50:51-05:00January 29th, 2015|Categories: Books, Christianity, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Robert Cheeks|

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. William Butler Yeats, Second Coming Jenny Teichman, a Cambridge philosophy professor, in her new book, The Philosophy of War and Peace, takes upon herself the challenging task of providing her readership with a concise and abbreviated disquisition on the philosophical foundation of war and peace. The success of the [...]

The Philosophy of Edith Stein

By |2019-08-08T15:16:26-05:00November 16th, 2014|Categories: Books, Featured, Philosophy, Robert Cheeks|Tags: |

One of the typical phenomena of the twentieth century is the event of spiritually energetic people breaking out of the dominant intellectual group in order to find the reality that has been lost.–Eric Voeglin [1] In the introduction to her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being, Edith Stein writes, “For the self-limitation of his power as regards [...]

Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self

By |2014-10-25T17:15:49-05:00October 25th, 2014|Categories: Books, Philosophy, Robert Cheeks|

A Review of C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays, Baylor University Press, 2006. We moderns might be forgiven for being just a bit confused, anxious, and even a little depressed. After all, ours is an age characterized by spiritual disorder bred of a persistent spiritual disease plaguing the modern psyche. [...]

M. Night Shyamalan’s “Devil”

By |2016-09-04T20:24:44-05:00September 5th, 2014|Categories: Film, Robert Cheeks|

Night Shyamalan’s film, Devil, his latest installment in his series of mythopoeic movies, gives the viewer the opportunity to glimpse ever so briefly the reification of a theosophical speculation that may have its roots in Boehme, where evil is rendered by a very real demon grimly determined to be about the business of gathering souls. [...]

A Review of Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

By |2013-12-20T15:28:30-06:00October 25th, 2013|Categories: Books, Robert Cheeks, Wendell Berry|

Wendell Berry is a philosopher, and an important one in this postmodern era, who utilizes the essay, the poem, and, most importantly, the novel, to express his observations of concrete human beings and their life in community. It is in his novels, purposefully located in an agrarian setting, that he depicts the intrinsic interdependency of the [...]

Your Heart Belongs to Me: Profundity in Popular Thrillers

By |2013-12-20T16:07:14-06:00September 26th, 2013|Categories: Books, Robert Cheeks|Tags: , |

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. — Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto I, l. The classical Greeks described, in etiological terms, the search or quest for “the ground of existence” by the use of the word aition. Aristotle applies [...]

Time and Timelessness: A Novel About John the Apostle

By |2016-04-30T12:56:20-05:00September 15th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Fiction, Robert Cheeks, Time|

John: A Novel, by Niall Williams Irish writer Niall Williams has written a novel that bridges the literary gap between time and the timeless. His latest work, John: A Novel, is a stunning revelation that “God is both ‘enclosed’ within the mystical soul, and he is the ‘enclosure’ that the mystic enters spiritually.” “The question came [...]

Mysticism and Space: Existential Theology

By |2020-01-09T11:21:52-06:00September 8th, 2013|Categories: Books, Robert Cheeks, Theology|

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 [...]

Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: C. Stephen Evans

By |2013-12-21T12:02:30-06:00April 11th, 2013|Categories: Books, Faith, Robert Cheeks|Tags: |

Given the spiritual disorder of our age, the ever-present pneumopathology of consciousness, we might be forgiven for being bit confused, anxious, and just a little depressed. Consequently, it falls to each of us to ignore the “autonomous” philosophers, who are in reality the closed system philodoxers (sophists) demanding the end to the quest and search those [...]

A Pair of Moles: Robert Penn Warren and William Styron

By |2023-08-23T19:06:20-05:00April 4th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Literature, Modernity, Poetry, Robert Cheeks, South|Tags: , , |

The literature of Robert Penn Warren and William Styron describes the decline of society, an annihilation of culture. It also projects a knowledge of the eternal struggle, forever bound by memory and the inherent yearning for a civilization that “is the refuge of sentiments and values, of spiritual congeniality, of belief in the word, of [...]

A Life of Flannery O’Connor: A Review

By |2016-08-02T22:24:23-05:00March 28th, 2013|Categories: Books, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Cheeks, South|

A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch Mary Flannery O’Connor described herself as a 13th century Catholic and she was right. Surprisingly in an age given to nihilism, progressivism, and consolidation this traditional, Southern, cerebral, talented and orthodox Catholic is among America’s most important writers. There are any number of literary, cultural, and psychological [...]

Hannah Coulter & The Bourgeois Family

By |2016-02-12T15:28:29-06:00February 21st, 2013|Categories: Agrarianism, Books, Christianity, Community, Culture, David L. Schindler, Robert Cheeks, Social Order, Wendell Berry|

The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]

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