Those who are blinded by materialism cannot see the landscape of history. They see systems instead of people, and empowerment instead of virtue. They can’t see the beautiful because they refuse to raise their eyes to heaven. The past is present whether we like it or not or know it or not. The past is [...]
By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]
As the gulf between classical and postmodern notions of conscience and government grows ever wider and their clashes more explosive, it is high time for the jury to give renewed attention to the nuances of Thomas More’s understanding of the apparently competing, but ultimately harmonious, demands of divine, natural, and human law. In August of [...]
Nearly three decades after the Reagan administration ended, several views of the fortieth president—all conflicting—have taken hold in the American popular mind. One is that Reagan was an “amiable dunce,” who was “sleepwalking through history.” Luck and circumstances made him a successful president, but he should be remembered today only as an oaf, simply being in [...]
Russell Kirk was aware that others had also claimed the mantle of humanism, but in the name of secularism. The revival of Christian humanism in our time is spurred by the need to respond to the rise of this popular secular humanism and its half-truths. During a dinner conversation with Russell and Annette Kirk in [...]
Going back to the first principles of the Founding, one finds that the Founders talked unceasingly about rights. Rights language became a critical part of the cultural landscape when James Otis delivered his oration on the nature of rights, the common law, and the natural law. Feel free to call me a conservative (I won’t [...]
Ridley Scott’s film is a vast oversimplification of a complex historical reality. Therein lies the danger. Like a mind-altering drug, the film provides a convenient shortcut that saves the audience the time and trouble of thinking for themselves. Filmgoers, of course, need not become experts in Napoleonic history. But Scott might have done more to [...]
When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. He conceived the strangest notion that ever took shape in a madman’s head, considering it desirable and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and the common good, [...]
Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates what he has found in an understandable and [...]
Because life often comes at you very fast, the cleaning of a khaki couch, like the cleansing of Augean stables, is a task that often waits for a hero’s journey. Or at least a lot of free time. This trembling period of early Covid insanity was one such time in which I felt both impulses. [...]
As you celebrate New Year’s Day remember that for one thousand years the welcoming of a new year was not just a calendar event, but a culturally religious event which linked the renewal of nature with the redemption of the world. Some atheists, Muslims, and Christian fundamentalists like to grumble and gibe that the celebration [...]
In his courage and perseverance throughout the Revolution, George Washington revealed his reliance on patience—and feelingly used the word when referring to his men at Valley Forge. In contemporary American society, the relationship between patience and power is often wary and distant: If people have power, then they won’t have to wait. Recently, however, these two [...]
The scholarship of Lee Congdon’s “Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West” is sound, demonstrating a breadth of knowledge and a depth of understanding of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West by Lee Congdon (164 pages, Northern Illinois University Press, 2017) This December will mark the centenary of [...]
Since the Renaissance, Christopher Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person. With the loss of the Medieval beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being, culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: [...]