Edgar Allan Poe & the Mask of the 20th Century

By |2023-10-06T20:30:44-05:00October 6th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Edgar Allan Poe, Literature, Timeless Essays|

The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures images of the macabre, murder, insanity, and self-destruction, but is this the real Edgar Poe? BUT for the cruel aspersions upon the character and life of America’s poetic genius, EDGAR ALLAN POE, this volume would have remained unwritten. EDGAR ALLAN POE has been more misunderstood than any other poet [...]

Educating for Wisdom

By |2023-08-31T19:08:38-05:00August 31st, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Books, Education, Truth|

David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]

The Dilemma of the Conservative Artist

By |2023-08-17T17:54:16-05:00August 17th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Conservatism, Featured, Literature, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]

Andrew Senior on John Senior, Proponent of Beauty & Tradition

By |2023-07-14T11:07:34-05:00July 13th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, John Senior, Liberal Learning, Tradition|

My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, [...]

Michelangelo’s Last “Pieta”

By |2023-06-25T18:00:48-05:00June 25th, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Christianity, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Religion, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

The Florentine Pieta was not commissioned. Instead, Michelangelo intended it for his own tomb. He worked on the sculpture in his spare time, late into the night with a candle fixed to his hat for light. The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo is an unmissable new sight in a visit to Florence. Designed by American art [...]

Maritain, Brann, & Raphael: Seeking Bridges to Beauty in Art

By |2023-05-22T21:56:56-05:00May 22nd, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Culture, Eva Brann, Philosophy, St. John's College|

Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]

Building Communities With Music

By |2023-06-06T13:49:46-05:00May 11th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Community, Culture, Music, Timeless Essays|

Classical music must find its place in love—love of home, of community, of neighbor, and of the culture that binds all these things together. In all but the most exceptional cases, our orchestras won’t survive if they don’t get this part right. Editor’s Note: This essay was presented as the opening address at the Future [...]

Impressions of a Soulless New Airport

By |2023-04-25T07:59:10-05:00April 24th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Beauty, Culture, John Horvat|

Architecture, even in the case of airports, should uplift and inspire the soul to consider higher and wider panoramas. By their logic and beauty, buildings should speak to us of God, the source of all beauty. I lament that so many new buildings seem designed to limit horizons to the purely material, functional, and superficial. [...]

Benedict XVI and the History of Art

By |2023-03-31T16:54:58-05:00March 31st, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Catholicism, History, Pope Benedict XVI|

“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and [...]

Traditional Worship: A Compendium of Culture

By |2023-03-24T20:43:27-05:00March 25th, 2023|Categories: Architecture, Art, Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, Senior Contributors|

It would be wrong to compare the Mass too closely to a stage production, but in a traditional celebration of Mass there is what I call a “compendium of culture”: a combination of art, architecture, literature, logic, rhetoric, drama, poetry, metalwork, textile art, and woodwork. Why does this matter? It matters because matter matters. The [...]

Educating the Moral Imagination: The Truth of Beauty

By |2023-03-13T15:25:16-05:00March 13th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Benjamin Lockerd, Essential, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Moral imagination is capable of grasping truth and goodness in ways that move us passionately to live in those objective realities. The answers to the errors of modern times need to be given in philosophy and theology, but it is essential that we also experience the truth imaginatively. Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that [...]

Caspar David Friedrich & the ‘Reliturgification’ of the West

By |2023-02-01T18:00:39-06:00February 1st, 2023|Categories: Art, Beauty, Culture|

Through their art, Romantic painters sought to restore the sacramental bond between the heavenly and the human. And among these artists, none was more focused on the lost liturgy of Western culture as Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings—almost exclusively concerned with the subject of landscapes—at first glance seem to have little or nothing to do [...]

Mystery Revealed: Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat

By |2023-01-30T17:25:31-06:00January 30th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, Franz Schubert, Music, Timeless Essays|

Oh, the emotional images Schubert stirs within me. A whiff of my childhood, dusk on a wintery Sunday, when the younger, chilled me has gone inside and Mom’s got a roast cooking in the oven, filling the air with an intoxicating aroma and a sense of security. Tell me if this has ever happened to [...]

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