The Lovely Dragon of Choice: The Freedom Not to Be Free

By |2021-08-11T19:01:42-05:00August 11th, 2021|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Culture, Essential, Featured, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

The Mark of the Educated Man

By |2019-03-26T14:36:02-05:00September 9th, 2017|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Education, Fr. James Schall, Philosophy|

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 [...]

Restoring Poetic Vision in a Myopic Age

By |2021-05-03T15:56:37-05:00September 8th, 2017|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Art, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Culture, Flannery O'Connor, Homer, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination, Truth|

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 [...]

“Message From Another World”: A Forgotten, Forbidden Textbook

By |2021-02-19T13:55:26-06:00January 25th, 2017|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Literature|

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 [...]

Sleepers, Wake!

By |2016-12-05T00:43:49-06:00December 3rd, 2016|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Catholicism, Christianity|

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 and Its Victims

By |2018-10-02T13:33:09-05:00November 22nd, 2016|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Featured, Marriage, Sexuality|Tags: |

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 [...]

From the Ruins: Rebuilding Civilization

By |2016-02-12T15:27:56-06:00August 1st, 2015|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Ethics, Featured, Modernity, Morality|

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, [...]

What is a Healthy Culture?

By |2019-05-30T12:11:06-05:00June 16th, 2015|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Community, Culture, Featured, Virtue|

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, [...]

Christmas Gifts that Conserve from Old New England

By |2016-02-12T15:28:04-06:00December 23rd, 2014|Categories: Anthony Esolen, C. R. Wiley, Christianity, Christmas, Gifts for Imaginative Conservatives|Tags: |

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 [...]

Living in Tormentaria

By |2018-12-07T16:39:39-06:00November 25th, 2014|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Family, Featured, Imagination|

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 [...]

A Literary Lament for Lost Love

By |2016-02-12T15:28:10-06:00June 25th, 2014|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Books, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Homosexual Unions, Marriage|

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 [...]

How to Form a Real Conscience

By |2022-09-03T09:51:14-05:00June 9th, 2014|Categories: Anthony Esolen, Christianity, Equality, Featured, Ideology, Liberal Learning, Religion|Tags: |

“For all I am of poet,” says the stranger to the two men climbing the mountain of Purgatory, the Aeneid was my mama and my nurse; without it, all my work weighs not a dram. And I’d content to spend an extra year— could I have lived on earth when Virgil lived— suffering for my [...]

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