Virtue

Inside Plato’s Cave

If you have an open mind and inquiring heart, you will recognize something incomparably wonderful in Plato’s writings, if only their profound resonance with Christian teachings. The Cave is a masterful metaphor for the soul trapped in sin... “All education is conversion” —Pierre Hadot I....

Pope Francis and the Caring Society

I’ve not been fully sure what to “make” of Pope Francis. He is clearly a man of God with a deep love for the poor and an even deeper personal humility. But how is one to respond to his pronouncements on economic and environmental issues?...

Reflections of a White Supremacist

With an unsettling sense of déjà vu I watched the events in Charlottesville unfold. I had seen it all before, not merely as a passive spectator watching it happen on television but as an active participant, feeling the rage and the anger and experiencing the violence at first...

The Three Great Teachers

Each great teacher locates the fundamental problem of human living differently: The Buddha cites suffering; Socrates points to ignorance; and Jesus identifies faulty love. In addition, all three Masters teach that the task set for each human soul is to travel from illusion to reality...

Monument to the Mediocre Man

The mediocre man perhaps takes comfort from the fact that there will never be a monument erected in his honor. He has taken great pains to do nothing extraordinary to merit such an action... As the violent...

The Mystery of Grace

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... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Romano Guardini as...

Hatred Comes in Many Colours: The Politics of Pride & Prejudice

Where there is Pride, there is prejudice; where there is prejudice, there is hatred; where there is hatred, there is the dehumanizing of the enemy; and where there is the dehumanizing of the enemy, there is the extermination that follows...

Manners, Humility, and Dignity

Customs and outward forms signal that one’s duty is greater than one’s self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism... Accounts vary, and a few say that the story about our civil Founders is apocryphal, but it would...

Benjamin Franklin on “The Morals of Chess”

"The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions"...

The Blessings of Capitalism

Capitalism offers us outstanding new ways to be good. As a civilization, we should concentrate on taking advantage of these remarkable opportunities rather than entertaining idle suggestions, born of intellectual confusion if not sloth and envy, that the great boon of capitalistic plenty is undesirable or an...

What Makes Life Worth Living?

It would be far too easy to see this life as merely a vale of tears—a time of trial we must experience and through which we must suffer with such virtue as we can muster, so as to reach a higher reward in the next life. What...

The Revitalized College: A Model

The peculiar conditions of our time and our society demand now, more than ever before, a reinvigoration of truly liberal learning. This hour is favorable to the restoration or establishment of a college with principle... A few years...

An Imaginative Conservative’s “Man of the House”

The theme of C.R. Wiley's "Man of the House" is that the Great Progressive Fallacy—the individual is the moral center of the culture, and that the state is the individual’s protector—serves only the forces of destruction... Man of the House: A Handbook for Building...

The Real Diogenes

Diogenes believed that the plaudits, power, honor, and gain that people spent their lives seeking were “mere fancy and illusion.” But did Diogenes truly practice what he preached?... Diogenes is one of my heroes. When I think...