Men of Valor: Tacitus and Thomas Aquinas on Virtue
When it played in the movie theaters, the terrific movie Act of Valor (2012) earned notoriety for two reasons. First of all, for its casting it used…
On Nietzsche and Hamlet: How Shakespeare Mirrors Sick Moderns
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the…
Shakespeare: Three Plays About Human Desire
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theme of romantic desire prohibited by the parents is treated in a very deliberate way. When parents, in opposition, stand…
Beware the Ides of March: Everybody Loves to Hate a Scapegoat
“Beware the Ides of March!” As it does every year, this March fifteenth affords us the opportunity to contemplate the recurrent patterns of history. Yet what exactly…
Revisiting Christopher Dawson on Culture
Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is not an ideology. It is, rather, a powerful hypothesis, to be tested by the…
The Essence of Missionary Christianity
Christopher Dawson has identified Six Ages in the history of the Church. In Dawson’s First Age, we witness a unique encounter of the “Barbarian” East with the…
Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church
Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church exhibit a cyclical pattern in historical events. Each Age exhibits an overall pattern of “rise and fall” during each cycle…
Reading the Signs of the Times Without Surrender
René Girard’s mimetic theory has described how mimesis leads to collective violence. His readings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy argue that tragedy reveals the origins of violent…
Spinoza and The Stoics on Suicide
Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics, and the Passions. Firmin DeBrabander. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Euthanasia and physician-assisted death is a topic much in…
Historical Consciousness and The Roman Road
Thomas Hardy’s mother died in 1904 at the age of ninety. One of the poems Hardy wrote, musing on her memory, is called “The Roman Road.” In…
Catullus on Sappho: The Divine Ecstasy of Love
The Roman poet Catullus translated a masterful love poem by the Greek poet Sappho, adapting it from her Greek (Sappho 31) into his Latin (Catullus 51). While…
Marcus Aurelius and The Dying Wisdom of the Gladiator
In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, the philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius makes a wonderful appearance. In this poetic portrayal of the truths of history, Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard…
Pizza Romana: The Mediterranean Diet and the Founding of Rome
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In…
Why the Roman Empire Was an Empire Like No Other
What made the Roman Empire an empire like no other was that it alone was the city that became an empire. Its distinctively republican civic form became…
The Sword of Damocles: No Friends for the Tyrant
The idea seems to be that even someone who has discipline, works hard, and is very active, will nonetheless still be unhappy if their own character is…