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by Ralph Ancil
In times of great social and political turbulence, when basic institutions are broken, discourse within them is futile since normal procedures will not produce just outcomes. But it is precisely then that adherence to traditional morality is not only fitting but essential. For it is in the rough cases where character is forged and honor, if not also greatness, is achieved through some form of courage as illustrated in the three examples from art above. The virtues that establish a society are also necessary for its maintenance. And today, as in times past, the object of the Christian remnant is not dialectical evolution of “new values” but fidelity to what has been revealed and received, to be a witness for truth. The Christian is many things, not least of which is a witness for the prosecution. And yet, perhaps by that very witness and the grace of God, the suicidal impulses of the West may be reversed...
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by Jacob Terneus
Recognition of beauty, if it does not lead to lion-fighting in every case—although it will for some—is always heroic. It requires two things: knowledge and love. When man pursues beauty, he takes it into himself and becomes beautiful through it; a perpetual beauty-seeker, such as Don Quixote, is, therefore, a beautiful man. In the course of naming Dulcinea de Toboso, Rocinante, and his other friends, Quixote becomes aware of what they really are and, knowing them as good and pleasing, embraces them. He leads a fantastical, errant life, but he does so by continually jumping into adventures for beauty, soaking in its pools wherever he can find them. Even if Don Quixote is insane, he causes the rest of us to rethink our sanity...
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by Gary L. Gregg
Most of us think of C.S. Lewis as a Christian apologist, perhaps the most influential of the twentieth century. Others know Lewis as the creator of the world of Narnia or of the Ransom trilogy of space novels. Some of us remember being swept away by the brilliance of his The Abolition of Man or have found solace in his books like A Grief Observed or The Problem of Pain. Some know him as a brilliant medievalist and seeming master of nearly everything that was ever written. Fewer of us, I think, realize how concerned Lewis was with the events of his own day and the intellectual currents underpinning the politics of the twentieth century. But, the gift I wish for the imaginative conservative this season is the gift of Lewis’ charming, witty and often brilliant observations of the political and social trends of the modern age...
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by Jeremy Kee
Romano Guardini traces the evolution of human nature itself from being focused on God and His order, to being about man and his disorder. In his furious attempt to transcend his own natural limits, man has imposed upon himself a metaphysical exile. He is adrift in the cosmos, having repudiated his natural home, which is to say his very nature. Living in discord and disharmony, believing himself to be master over nature, man walks upright with a false air of freedom and liberation. Man, in other words, has by his own choosing entered into a self-imposed existential exile. His view of what was natural shifted with his view of himself. No longer was nature something within which man lived by which he was defined; rather it was now something man created, directed, and to which he offered definition...
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by George Stanciu
We must not forget that science is only one of the many ways we are connected to things—a wonderful way at that—but it does not embrace the totality of being, and thus doing science is only part of the spiritual life. Love and hate, hope and despair, freedom and enslavement cannot be measured on a meter; existence is vastly greater than the results of measuring apparatus, and measurements, themselves, ultimately depend upon a human observer. If scientists were to look inward with the same seriousness with which they look outward, they would be forced to reflect upon the interior life, upon the creature who seeks truth, desires to know everything, delights in beauty, experiences joy when the truth is encountered, and wonders about why nature can be known at all. Doing science does reveal much about the interior life. But the experimental method renders science, itself, mute about meaning, purpose, and value...
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