The Wonder of “The Comedy”: How to Read Dante
Although the Comedy is a poem of impeccable order, the poet is careful to make sure that our first impression is not of the poem’s architecture but…
Although the Comedy is a poem of impeccable order, the poet is careful to make sure that our first impression is not of the poem’s architecture but…
When we think of love sonnets, most of us think of the sappy ooze of lyricists or the sometimes flavorless mush in cheap greeting cards. When they…
Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell. James M. Patterson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Patrick Deneen’s provocative book, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale, 2018), argues…
"Poor people are subject to fancies—this is a provision of nature. I myself have had reason to know this. The poor man is exacting. He cannot see…
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) comments that in the Thirteenth-Century Quest of the Holy Grail, the wasteland motif has largely contracted into the figure of the maimed king. The…
Homer bequeaths to posterity one of the earliest visions of a wasteland, anticipating T. S. Eliot by three millennia. Eliot, incidentally, acknowledges his debt to Homer by…
"There are no deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away…
Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange mixture of conflicting impulses; so chronically sick that writing was a physical agony for his eyes and his stomach permanently bothered him,…
Recently, some European politicians and journalists have been making well-intentioned appeals to the "spirit of the Enlightenment" or the "values of the Enlightenment". In the face of…
36th International Meeting of THE ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY, 2020 American Political Science Association Meeting, September 10-13, San Francisco, CA David Walsh, Meeting Director [email protected] Dear…
The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It. Yascha Mounk. Harvard University Press, 2019. The wave of right-wing nationalism…
Historically, American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and vote for Democratic Party candidates.1 The estimated percentage of Jews identifying as Democrats ranges, but the estimates are roughly 65%…
I argue that Girard’s understanding of the political order is largely in line with Thomistic thinking on the common good. In following Girard in his extrapolations of…
The Catholic Church’s recent definitive revocation of the death penalty[1] suggests that something in the zeitgeist demands a rethinking of one strand of conservative thought. Always the…
Modern American conservatism rose in the 1950s under the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank S. Meyer at the old National Review magazine, culminated in 1980 with…