When a lover of poetry as sensitive and intelligent as C.S. Lewis provides us a translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” we should pay attention. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, edited by A.T. Reyes (184 pages, Yale University Press, 2011) Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one [...]
To see and to live is better than to choose; to ride the adventure of faith and hope and love is better than to plot your course to the Fortunate Isles, those illusions. But all things come to them that wait. Into sight silently draws a ship, draped in black silk, with a maiden of [...]
Genuine education is rooted in the kind of timeless perspective which modern society arrogantly abjures. Such education provides depth and breadth… We are born and live in a certain location and in a certain time. By what appears to be the caprice of geography and chronology, we are thus, in a sense, “locked into” a particular [...]
In a distorted world, the Christian poet is ultimately like the blind man whose vision Christ restored to see truth through grace, and those who read the poet’s words will find their vision restored as well. Editor’s Note: This essay was originally given as a part of a lecture series for the Cambridge School of [...]
I am too old to want to spend the evening of my career trying to shore up a crumbling wall, when those who are in authority at the college are unwilling to listen to our pleas. No, I’d prefer to be in on building something exciting for the Church and for sheer ordinary humanity… Sometimes a [...]
Such textbooks as the one I found would be drummed out of today’s schools, where children are taught to be embarrassed by piety, honor, purity, and faith. I am musing upon a fine book written by a teacher and prolific author, Leroy Armstrong. He is introducing the reader to the life and the work of [...]
With the liturgy, we encounter the God who has made us and who has given us the liturgy as the form and the consummation of our praise. The liturgy sweeps us out of ourselves... Anyone coming upon Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Liturgy and Personality (Hildebrand Press), who thinks it will be a manual on how to imbue the [...]
The awakened man does not gaze into the pool of his spirituality, like a more ethereal Narcissus. He sees Christ in his neighbor, and his is a life of longing, hope, gratitude, solemn emotion, and openness to the mysteries of being… Many of us no doubt have heard the common excuse for breaking the third [...]
The sexual revolution has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness. Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim… What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of [...]
Let’s get straight to the point. We no longer live in a culturally Christian state. We do not live in a robust pagan state, such as Rome was during the Pax Romana. We live in a sickly sub-pagan state, or metastate, a monstrous thing, all-meddlesome, all-ambitious. The natural virtues are scorned. Temperance is for prigs, [...]
How should we judge the health of a culture? We might do it by pointing to its greatest virtues. The Greek city states between 500 and 300 B.C., though they were not especially densely populated, gave the West the architectural “language” it still employs for everything from grand hotels to private homes. The colonial house, [...]
On election night, when the returns come in, folks around the country generally look upon the results from New England with a mixture of horror and puzzlement. Even though I have lived in New England most of my life I admit to looking at them in the same way. My feelings have something to do [...]
We ought to rename our planet according to the bureaucratic shackles we place upon our children. We shall call it Tormentaria. It seems quite apt. The Tormentarians are a humane race. They don’t favor harsh (though swift) punishment; they grow queasy if anyone mentions a whipping post or even a smack on the posterior. They [...]
If you write a book exposing our society’s aggressive LGBTQ agenda do not expect to be thanked. Do not expect to be noticed. Do not expect for your book to register on the cultural radar. Expect the opposite. Robert R. Reilly’s recent book Making Gay Okay was ignored not only by progressive elites, but also [...]