Welcome the New Editor to VoegelinView!
Hello friends. Let me introduce myself. I’m Paul Krause. I’ll be the new head editor at VoegelinView as Lee transitions out. Our official transition date is January…
Hebraic Exceptionalism and Western Exceptionalism
Western civilization is back in vogue, or, at least, is starting to have defenders again in the midst of civilizational malaise, crisis, and desecration. But what is…
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Alex Ross. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Richard Wagner “sums up…
The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “The Ring”
Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells,…
The Importance of the Liberal Arts in the 21st Century
The liberal arts have long been suffering in academia and education more generally. Chants for the ending of Western liberal arts for new inclusionary material, dwindling humanities…
Literature and the Apotheosis of the Soul
Books have been under assault for a long time. Mass media and television, as Ray Bradbury imagined with dystopian prophecy, was just getting the fire started. Then…
Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece
Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece. Paul Cartledge. New York: Abrams Press, 2020. In the annals of ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta looms large. Athens…
“The Fifth Element”: Unconscious Christianity & Science Fiction
Luc Besson’s now cult classic The Fifth Element gave us a retro-futuristic take on the apocalypse and messianism which was suffused with Christian motifs and symbolism. In…
Unfallen Joy and the Tragedy of Love: “Waterloo Bridge”
The 1940 MGM adaptation of Waterloo Bridge is one of my favorite films. It stars Vivien Leigh, in the wake of her Gone With the Wind fame,…
Saint Jane Austen
Among the realist tradition of writing, I must profess a great fondness for Russian realism. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak strike me as having produced a great corpus…
Jonathan Edwards and the Re-Enchantment of the Saeculum: The Puritan and Edwardsian Roots of the Idea of Social Progress
Jonathan Edwards has been called “the American Augustine.”[1] From the threads of introspective piety to the Edwardsian conception of aesthetics, there are strong influences and inheritances from…
The Fall of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine
Plotinus was the last great Hellenic philosopher active during the rise of Christianity just as Christianity was just beginning to supersede the pagan Hellenic world. It remains…
The Geopolitics of American Reaction
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States in 2016 was the culmination of a long history of geopolitical factionalism and resentment that…
Reading Homer from Here to Eternity
“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” That famous protest chant at Stanford University was the manifestation of, admittedly, a long deconstructive project aiming…
Walter Benjamin’s Folly
Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism. Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Walter Benjamin was one of the…