What We’re Reading
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun. World War I, insofar that it is remembered by Americans, is remembered as the first world war America won. The Great…
The True Knight: Arthurian Romance in the Shadow of Dante’s Divine Comedy
The knight puts on his armor and readies to mount his steed. He has heard of a faraway land that is tyrannized by a dark evil and…
A Dreamy Sort of Fatherland
When Bedrich Smetana composed his symphonic poem Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”) in 1874, he was tapping into a long lineage of nationalist works stemming back to the early Romantic…
Last Selfie Before Euthanasia
I was recently leafing through one of the Dutch daily newspapers. On the third page, almost half a column long, there was an article—a report from a…
A Field Trip
They wandered about the exhibit of the emperor long dead, though, no august history would inhibit boyish thoughts swirling in their heads. So, the whispers and the…
Secularity as a Canvas for Personhood: Reflections on David Walsh’s “The Invisible Source of Authority, God in a Secular Age”
With his most recent masterpiece, The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age (2025), Professor David Walsh has truly reached a summit in his luminous…
The Bullet Tree of Life: “Angel Down” and the Condition for Salvation
I have a low tolerance for despair in literature, and as a result, I cannot stomach much contemporary literary fiction. At the same time, I do not…
Punishment, Indignation, and Moral Education in Dante
Leo Strauss’s reflections on punishment in The Divine Comedy, found in the transcripts of his lectures on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, draw attention to a subtle…
Your Old Men Will Dream Dreams
Regard that old man sleeping over there His nasal snores, his silver strands of hair That streak in patches all along his face And that stale smell…
Why is AI the culmination of Modern Gnosticism?
I consider Eric Voegelin’s “Modern Gnosticism” thesis the crowning point of his work. I know that the thesis is the most controversial part of his work, and…
A Roman World at War
“The corpse was lying where Caesar fell, covered ignominiously in the blood of the man who had marched as far west as Britain and the Ocean and…
Joseph Joubert: The Cursed Desire
I came to Joseph Joubert fairly recently, the kind of encounter that makes you wonder immediately why it took so long. He is not a companion of…
The Inventive Wickedness of the Ultimate Tyranny: Leo Strauss vs. Carl Schmitt
Amongst the strange bedfellows of history, a most unique relationship occurred in the immediate lead up to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. This relationship…
Cicero on the Rostra
The flies buzz above the decaying hands, Whose subtle fingers once etched the republic’s last defense. The noble head, with pin pierced tongue, demands the shame of…
Faust and the Confrontation with Darkness
Have you ever felt paralysed, heartbroken, or caught wagering with the devil himself? If so, you may relate to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's protagonist in his episodic…