Christopher Dawson and the History We Are Not Told
A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The temples of the gods are the The post Christopher Dawson and the History We Are Not Told appeared first...
View ArticleLiterature and the Foundations of the West
Raphael’s School of Athens In the early twenty-first century the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition of uncertainty. No one is willing to say what it should consist...
View ArticleBen Jonson: Good Society
Civilization is memory.–Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.–G. K. Chesterton The sort of poem that is written in praise of a particular...
View ArticleJohn Dryden: The Politics of Style
John Dryden The rise in Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, coincides perfectly with a drastic shift in our taste in poetry, and doubtless with a shift in other kinds of feeling as...
View ArticleSamuel Johnson as Hero
Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget its very high-risk background. In his maturity, Johnson possessed a regal quality. He had produced his Dictionary of the English...
View ArticleIn the Dark Fields of the Republic: What is the West?
In the aftermath of 9/11, the term “civilized nations” suddenly began to be widely used. Of course, everyone had always known that England and France are civilized and that Syria and Rwanda-Burundi are...
View ArticleEdmund Burke and the English Revolution
In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. What Burke did in...
View ArticleLiterature & the Foundations of the West
The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been...
View ArticleThomas Gray’s Desperate Pastoral
In his “Elegy,” Thomas Gray wrote a great, sometimes mystifying and troubling poem, and, where the pastoral impulse is concerned, an admonishing one… No one born after the French Revolution, said the...
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