Daniel McInerny’s "Beauty & Imitation" is a superb reactivation not only of Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis but also with an Aquinas enhancement. From the first page forward, in fine prose, McInerny surveys with sincerity and depth the Catholic understanding of the arts, beauty, and sublimity. Despite, or perhaps in part because of its importance and [...]
Any attempt to interpret history as a whole, if it is not to succumb to gnostic myth, must posit some subject which works in and reveals itself in the whole of history and which is at the same time [the belief in] a being capable of providing general norms. —Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, A [...]
Plato argues that music is a moral law that gives soul to the universe and wings to the mind. And that music gives flight to the imagination, charm to sadness, gaiety to life and is the essence of order and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful. Is Plato right that musical [...]
Orestes Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions, we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by [...]
Don Larsen didn’t know he was going to start that fifth game of the 1956 World Series until he arrived at Yankee Stadium and discovered a baseball tucked inside his baseball spikes. Shapes of Philosophical History Mr. Meyer passed away late spring in 1956 leaving behind his wife and one child, a son, Curtis, who [...]
I suspect that my true “political consciousness” began around the months surrounding mid-1963 to mid-1964 and for reasons you, my patient reader, I hope can understand and share. Can my awareness of what came across the airwaves and was broadcast in black and white on our family television be likened to an emerging “political consciousness?” [...]
There are few twentieth-century intellectual figures to whom one might apply the adjective “essential.” One of the earliest is Paul Elmer More, perhaps the last century’s greatest Christian apologist. The final appeal of the humanist is not to any historical convention but to intuition. —Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” in Norman Forester, Humanism [...]
What in the twenty-fifth hour might happen to those of us who prefer to live outside the data flow, still analog, still un-captured? Take some time to read "The Twenty-Fifth Hour," a deep and dark book narrating history prior to World War II. It is for the reader to wonder if the novel resonates today. [...]
It’s time for Orestes Brownson to re-enter our contemporary political discourse, and on the campaign trail to remind us, first, that all just authority is from God, who instituted natural law, and also, that moral authority is not relative. I. The Brownson Revival In 1993 Peter J. Stanlis revisited Orestes Brownson’s political thought by reviewing [...]
I could see down below the mountain path a lone figure coming up, dressed in a brown cloak and with a walking stick. It was a wandering monk, who introduced himself simply as Brother Anthony and plopped himself down. He had no weariness in his heart and soul, or so it seemed to me. This little [...]
Saul Bellow's protagonist Artur Sammler is both witness and survivor to the central event in his own time: the attempt on the part of Hitler and his henchmen to eradicate European Jewry. But even though the novel takes place in a different time and place, behind those contemporary times are the ghosts from that World [...]
It always struck me as a curious expression and one my mother always used when she caught me in a moment of idle day-dreaming, a gift I own to this day: woolgathering. More so since the veterinarian in my small home town did raise sheep and did shear sheep and sent us out with bags [...]
“Old books” speak to the times, often in more profound ways than “new books.” Christopher Dawson's "Beyond Politics" is just such a book. It diagnosed in 1939 the cultural situation in which the book appeared, and its diagnosis is apropos to the cultural situation today. Here’s the front story followed by the more important back [...]
Walter Lippmann believed that Natural Laws are the principles of right reason and behavior in the good society governed by Western traditions of civility. It is possible to organize a state and conduct a government on quite different principles, but the outcome will not be freedom and the good life. Thus the environment with which [...]