Michael Knowles is a young man of whom, until recently, I was unaware. My curiosity was piqued when I saw him on the panel at a conference I attended. What he had to say was […]
The other night, I watched a few minutes of the comedian Ricky Gervais’s new comedy show. Early in, he does a bit about his atheism and his willingness nonetheless to abide expressions of religious devotion. […]
For more than forty years, Catholic liberal arts colleges have, to put it mildly, struggled to carve out a recognizable intellectual and educational place in the ever-shifting landscape of American higher education. That they have […]
The poet, literary biographer, and Catholic spiritual writer, Paul Mariani published his last book of poems, Ordinary Time, in 2019. Much of it written in the aftermath of his recovery from a brain tumor, the […]
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has been hard to resist the lust for justice. Putin’s brutal tactics, along with the pathos of his victims and the courage of Ukrainian resistance, all shared online […]
In his classic book Suicide of the West, James Burnham famously characterized liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” I’ve been meaning for some time to write up an essay on the book. This isn’t it. […]
Comprehensive ideological systems, which determine the prevailing world view in societies and cultures, are based on so-called “grand narratives”.1 Such grand narratives are mostly of a religious nature. In earlier phases of human cultural development, […]
One of the most fundamental divides in the history of philosophy is that between a more Platonic approach and a more Aristotelian approach. Plato, of course, saw the universal or formal level of being as […]
Since the ancient Greeks, there have generally been two opposing impulses for political thought. The first is summed up in Plato’s Republic, the second in Aristotle’s polis. The republic is large and relies on the […]
Walker Percy’s father committed suicide when Walker was a teenager. After his mother drove her car off a Louisiana bridge, he was raised by an agnostic first-cousin. Such experiences have driven many a young soul […]
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