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Francis of Assisi teaches us that those who want to embrace the joys of this life must also embrace suffering. Our forgetfulness of this truth could explain the current crisis of our civilization.
Various trends in American religion and right-wing politics further indicate that as the political influence of Christian nationalism is waxing, that of religious conservatism is waning. This need not be a fixed situation, but it does mean religious conservatives will have ample need of God’s grace as they consider how to avoid moral and spiritual compromise while navigating a particularly treacherous political landscape.
Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.
Hörcher adeptly elucidates how Scruton’s belief in the intertwining of aesthetics, morality, and politics stands as a bulwark against the often fragmented worldview of today’s modern thinkers.
Perhaps the greatest lesson Plenty Coups has to offer us is this: prudence and courage in the face of an unknown future make sense if they are grounded on God’s greater love for us and the promise of his abiding care. Hope impels us to hand on our religious and cultural inheritance even as many reject it. It encourages us to build new institutions as old ones fall apart.
A parallel challenge exists in preparing active participants for life as citizens and as members of church communities. Similar strategies can help both.
The liberal tradition is an ongoing conversation in which participants speak in a wide range of accents, reflecting the various “nouns” to which speakers are committed: liberal individualists and liberal communitarians, liberal nationalists and liberal internationalists, liberal believers and liberal skeptics, liberal socialists and—yes—liberal free marketeers.
For Newman, the discovery of any reasonable political settlement would first require what both the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk and the Oxford Movement had hoped to do: prepare the public imagination for an apostolic church, an institution in which obedience without mental slavery was married to liberty without self-will.
Classical schools embrace an older understanding of education, one that prepares students for festivity and friendship, rather than socially handicapping them. Like their ancient and medieval predecessors, classical educators maintain that a crucial purpose of education is to liberate students from a calculative, utilitarian mindset by teaching them how to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile activities for their own sake.
The problem with the way that discussions surrounding university education are often framed is that they seem to accept as inevitable a pernicious anthropology that presumes students are autonomous subjects, consuming in order to be consumed. But we are more than what we achieve, more than we produce, more than our billable hours.
Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
Pope Pius XII exhorts the faithful to participate in daily Mass, frequent confession, personal prayer, mortification, and works of mercy. These practices are not minor, weak, or irrelevant responses to a world crisis; on the contrary, the pope believes they are powerfully efficacious and necessary, strengthening the bonds uniting the mystical body of Christ and sowing the seeds of peace. His counsel is spiritual in nature, but socio-political in its effects.
In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
“My book is based on a series of dangerous ideas that have led us to where we are now. Beginning with the insidious theories of John Money, these ideas progressed through the fields of psychology and psychiatry and eventually infiltrated our educational and legal systems—corrupting many of the country’s most powerful institutions.”
What the sexual revolution began by upsetting gender roles and obscuring the necessary link between marriage and procreation, the reproductive revolution continues, shattering our conceptions of motherhood and fatherhood and severing the bond between parents and children.
Audiobooks’ greatest potential is to encourage a sense of receptivity and leisure throughout the rest of life, not just one’s reading life. Listening to a novel, accepting its rhythms and flow of detail on the book’s own terms, is a gentle reminder that life’s most glorious things demand quiet, silent admiration, and loving acceptance.
A Web of Our Own Making overflows with disquieting observations about the ways digital technology is reshaping human nature. Antón Barba-Kay puts into haunting words the anxiety, exhaustion, and emptiness that most of us feel but cannot put into words because we are too busy scrolling and ogling.
We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
Activities like gardening—what Josef Pieper has called “active leisure”—offer even more than third places can. They too are a meeting ground for people of any background, but active leisure is more deeply rooted in a true vision of our condition: creatures responsible for stewarding what’s been given to us alongside others.
The United States must apologize for treating blacks with contempt and compensate with reparations those American blacks who lived through racial segregation. But reparations for all black Americans will not erase the wealth gap between blacks and whites, nor improve the significant educational achievement gap rampant throughout the black communities in this country.
Trump—and more broadly, the style of politics he represents—did not rise to power on the shoulders of the religious right, but rather the post-religious right. Indeed, his presidency was made possible by the very process of secularization that the religious right has long sought to combat.
The deterioration of housing affordability suggests that we must reorient current policies on land use  and focus on more fundamental objectives: people’s need for housing
303 Creative prevents a First Amendment violation where it would be most keenly felt—the government commanding an individual to use her creative talent to create and promote a message antithetical to her conscience or beliefs. The relative rarity of prior cases involving attempts to compel creative commercial speech may have reflected a tacit consensus that this was a First Amendment redline, not lightly to be crossed.