"The average person has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual"

Essays of the Week

Suicide and Secularism on a Wednesday Afternoon by Carl Olson The average person, wrote Percy in the essay “Diagnosing The Modern Malaise,” “has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon… What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?” How much of one’s desperation comes from apparently having it all, according to the precepts of secular humanism—the great false religion of our time—and yet having nothing at all to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon?  [MORE] Speech and Silence by George Stanciu Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the genetic code...  [MORE] On Loving Words by Bradley J. Birzer Not only is the art of making a book sacred, but, when done well, the words within those books are sacred as well. After all, Christ came as the Word, and words, when properly understood, reflect His eternal glory and dignity, even if confined to ink on a page. My family and I spent hours just reading together (not to each other; but quietly to ourselves), and we spent just as many hours talking about what we had read, what we had understood, and what was next...  [MORE] The Myth of Modernism by Michael De Sapio For many people, modernism connotes art or music that substitutes ugliness for beauty, denies meaning in the universe, or destroys the idea of art itself. Many artists forsook depicting the objective world around them in favor of their subjective mental states (e.g., surrealism) or arrangements of shapes and colors. It seemed as if the created world was there to be deconstructed. In the popular mind, artistic modernity is defined by the iconoclasts, those who insisted on making that “radical break” with tradition. But is this the whole story?  [MORE] A Foray Into Metaphysical Poetry With John Donne by Nayeli Riano Something about the way in which metaphysical poetry engages the mind is unique to this style of verse. A combination of relatable simplicity with conceptual eclecticism renders it into a form of expression that can be deeply and personally felt by the reader, but only once he works through the poet’s intricate analogies and “metaphysical” concepts. Such poetry is seldom direct and easy to decipher, which is what makes it so intellectually stimulating to read...  [MORE] True Love: Passionate Reason versus Romantic Feeling On Work: Homer’s Advice to Us Liberal Learning, Great Books & Paideia Why “The Great Music” Is as Important as “The Great Books” Defining America Salvation and Sufficiency: A Lesson from Statistics Why America Needs Thomas Aquinas Now The Faith and the South Freedom’s Flaw in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel “Annabel Lee” “All the Hollowed Shells” A Sonnet for Saint Valentine