Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul and America’s Soul (Part I)
Hope Amidst Crisis Bob Dylan has only gone and released a new song, his first original music in eight years, right in the heart of the crisis…
Quantum Mechanics and Religion Revisited
At a 1932 conference on quantum mechanics it was suggested that physicists should not worry about what quantum mechanics indicates about the nature of reality and they…
The Idol of Our Age: Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney at Abigail Adams Institute
Please see Daniel J. Mahoney's lecture, "The Idols of Our Age," at the Abigail Adams Institute, Harvard University. The YouTube link is here.
Orthodoxy and the Mob
In Matthew 22:21, Jesus is quoted as saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” in response to…
Confronting Nihilism: Towards a Political Theory of the Psalms
I. In contradistinction to the efforts directed towards reviving modernity, several attempts to recover the older understanding of a common moral order, grounded in a disciplined habit…
Two Kinds of Sacrifice: René Girard’s Analysis of Scapegoating
Mimesis and Scapegoating Humans are intensely mimetic. We learn to talk, walk, and nearly everything else by imitation. But because we also imitate each other’s desires, other…
Hannah Arendt: Philosopher of Politics, History, and Faith
Hannah Arendt’s immigration to the United States in the early 1940s reminds me of a comment made by a professor of a post-WW2 American history course that…
Rocky: Becoming Man
“Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing…
Rocky: A Theatre for Heroism
‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that…
The Mystery of It All and Ordinary Times
The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. Paul Mariani. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2019. Ordinary Time: Poems. Paul Mariani. Eugene,…
Christopher Hitchens is Not Great
Self-Sealing Fallacy Some modern militant atheists like to claim things like “religion ruins everything.” Or that the planet would be so much better off without a belief…
A Bone of Him Shall Not Be Broken
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Tom Holland. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Immediately after Christ’s crucifixion, the Roman soldiers, approaching the condemned thieves beside…
Litter-Picking the Teacher’s Soul for Contemplative Pursuits
A number of years ago, I abandoned a secure, well-paying high school teaching position and took up a job picking litter for the city’s Roads Department. At…
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 Fisher-Price God: A Call to Childlike Play
But let us ever praise him, and extol His bounty, following our delightful task To prune these growing Plants, and tend these Flow’rs, Which were it toilsome,…
