The Almost-Chosen President
Abraham Lincoln is America’s greatest and most important president. Although a contrarian might like to assert George Washington, himself a great president, the honest reality is that…
The Odyssey of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine
We who live today take for granted the notion that Odysseus was a noble figure, a sort of archetype for the soul’s yearning for home. This hasn’t…
Editor’s Commentary
With 2023 behind us and the new year opening for a great beginning, it is with pleasure that I get to announce to our readers that we…
Hemingway and Me: Or How I Learned to Love Hemingway and Stop Worrying About His Hopelessness
I did not always like Ernest Hemingway. In some ways I still don’t. Among the post-Great War American writers, I consider F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck…
The Godfather of Permanent Things
Russell Kirk stands alongside a pantheon of conservative thinkers and writers from the past century. His The Conservative Mind, now 70 years old, was the magnum opus…
VoegelinView Year in Review
2023 has capped off an important year of transformation for VOEGELINVIEW. Our change into a public journal of the arts and humanities, cultural and intellectual criticism, and…
The Spiritual Architecture of Handel’s “Messiah”
George Frederic Handel is one of the most recognizable names in classical music, even if most people only know his name for the Hallelujah Chorus of “Messiah.”…
Singing Christmas with Rankin/Bass
Growing up, the 25 Days of Christmas on ABC Family was an essential part of the Christmas holiday. Among my favorite films that were often shown were…
The Uses of Spiritual Memory
Does art and literature matter? In our age of vandalism and philistinism, it seems not. Activism in the name of the latest leftwing fad, “decolonizing” art and…
Napoleon Undressed: Ridley Scott’s Imagination Rules the Screen
Napoleon Bonaparte is the one dictator that the world has a love-hate relationship. More than petty kings and emperors of the past, Napoleon forcibly seized political power…
To Kill the King
On a chilly January afternoon, King Charles I appeared before the black-draped scaffold that had been hastily constructed just for him. The King of England who had…
Editor’s Commentary
Like many of you, the October 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas terrorist shocked me and much of the world. Having resided in Jerusalem for a brief…
What Did Saint Ignatius of Antioch Really Believe About the Eucharist?
It is commonplace, even among most non-Catholic Christians, to read Saint Ignatius as affirming “sacramental realism” in his writings. When I was at Yale, this was the…
A Tale of Two Revolutionaries
I recall being somewhat bored reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in my AP English class in high school the first time I read that great work,…
Dreams of Jerusalem
Like most Americans, my first encounter with Jerusalem was reading about it in the Bible. It was the capital city of David’s Israel, the city where the…