In the First Letter to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:9-10), Saint Paul informs us (RSV CE 2nd ed.) “The law is not laid down for the righteous but for… immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine”. Stern words indeed. In the Vulgate, what the RSV renders “kidnappers” is plagis, [...]
Christian schools must not follow their secular counterparts in their educational approach. They must surround their students with the noble, the beautiful, and the true in all areas of the curriculum and the academic environment, encouraging them to become like what they see. In the cultural wasteland of the ’70s, where peace and love had [...]
If schools truly seek to form students capable of philosophical inquiry, they must recover the ancient understanding of "arithmetike" as a pathway to truth. Only then will mathematics resume its rightful place among the liberal arts, serving not as a practical tool but as a means of intellectual and spiritual formation. Walk into any elementary mathematics [...]
Conservatism seeks the Truth that has emerged over time, drawing from the deep wellsprings of human experience, and builds anew on foundations that have withstood the tests of time. It fosters order and the flourishing of human beings as they live in relationship with one another. We are united in the eternal contract between the [...]
On grace depends our salvation, but we have neither a right to grace nor the power to compel it. Grace must reveal itself to us, and only then will we recognize it. Through your creation, O Lord, goes a voice that reminds us of something that is above everything created. The things and their ordering, [...]
For all those out there wondering, including my first-grade art teacher who never learned how to pronounce it, my surname is actually pronounced with a long rather than short “e.” It’s “DEE-vuhl” and not “Devil.” But the moniker of a demon has been applied to me so often that I have decided to make demon-ade. [...]
Many academics have forgotten the true and the good and have largely cut themselves loose from all philosophical moorings. Students under the tutelage of such professors are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in [...]
Now we’ve always been a happiness oriented culture. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and so forth. Right? But it’s taken a particularly interesting turn: the topic of “meaning” and “meaning in life” is coming to the fore. People, more and more, are talking about not just sheer contentedness, but what it is for [...]
It makes no sense to reward someone who frustrates the purposes of literature with a major prize. Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai. There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out [...]
Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
Both Chandler and Steinbeck, in radically different idioms and voices, express a redemptive optimism. They believe in truth, and they are infused with an intuition of an untarnished human goodness that the shabbiness of the world cannot extinguish. The 1930s were a period of intellectual and cultural ferment that have much to tell us about [...]
Only by recognizing the divine mystery that predicates existence in the world can one reclaim his individuality. Only then will he be capable of searching for meaning generated outside the human intellect. Humans can never be gods, but they need God to live meaningful lives. Most students I teach believe that reality is subjective and [...]
Do you believe in a higher power, something that transcends the “human organism”? If this question is trivialized or ignored, we enter the very sound and soul of despair. Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings. Philosophy, literally translated, is the love of wisdom. Philosophical anthropology, then, is the scientific study of humans for [...]
In a world and at a time when men have discarded the idea of intellectual truth, it is through the soul and in the imagination that they can, and must, be reached. In a recent address to the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, Cardinal Raymond Burke called for a return to Summorum Pontificum and greater access [...]