fbpx
Search Results For:

Search Results for: window

It’s useful to heed the words of Gabriel Marcel when it comes to desire. To paraphrase his “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived,” perhaps we could instead say: “Desire is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” Girard himself refers to desire as a “mystery” on numerous occasions. I think he spent his entire life trying to understand that mystery.
Many academics, perhaps recognizing the extreme nature of such boycotts, justify them by caricaturing Israeli policies as comparable to Nazism. It is only by such extreme assertions that boycotts can justify themselves.
There are no blackout curtains, only more or less obscurity to be overcome by the work of interpretation. Much of the burden of Hirsch’s two books is to describe the methods and account for the limitations of such work. The discussion is richly informed by linguistics and epistemology, governed by rigorous logic, and elegantly written.
In a time when the political, religious, and cultural challenges strikingly parallel those of Machen’s day, his arguments and actions offer us a set of timeless and timely insights. We would all do well to observe them.
Christmas teaches us this great mystery: the truth of Trinitarian love is so beautiful and heart-breaking that it could only be communicated in the form of a child.
We stand at the dawn of a new era in an important realm of constitutional law. As we step into this new dispensation, Agreeing to Disagree will serve well as a road map and guidebook to what comes.
Welcoming human imperfection in its manifold expressions is a boon for those of us who lack the privilege of full-time scholarship. It is not in spite of, but thanks to, the inherent inefficiencies of our rich and often chaotic lives that so many of us can enjoy the pursuit of intellectual enrichment.
There is no shortage of opinions on how to manage the ubiquity of technology. Every parent will have his or her own opinion on these matters. But there is one key, frankly very uncomfortable, factor without which even the best of such ideas are sure to fail our kids: that at least in part, responsible technology use is caught, not taught. The modeling parents offer matters a great deal. And we do not always model well.
While a book like John Rist’s is diminished by its flaws, it’s not entirely unfair about our current moment.
There is no romance without the real presence of God, no sacramental imagination without the sacraments, and the wonders of fantasy cannot be asserted of primary reality itself.
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.
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.
The militant Russian religious conservatism of the twenty-first century, paradoxically, mirrors the Soviet anti-religious socialism of the twentieth century. Their common feature is a shameless instrumentalization of religion, with the consent of the latter.
A book in its entirety, once given to the world, is a kind of integer, a whole from which nothing should be subtracted if it is to remain what it is.
Fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness.
If The Nursery is a tale of motherhood, it is only a half-truth. Yes, giving birth to a child will leave you sleep deprived and emotional and physically scarred. That’s only half of the story.
“Stigmarketing,” which is appealing to claims of stigma to motivate social change, has become the backbone of legal efforts toward that end. Stigmarketing capitalizes on gay–straight differences, and the way these disparities can be measured by the absolute surge in research on “minority stress theory,” or MST.
We are attempting a struggle against a dehumanizing revolution—but we are all attempting to overcome the same common threat. City building isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that calm. At the same time, in our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own revolution.
The attempt to control thought can do incalculable damage, however doomed it is ultimately. Just as Plato’s guardians are to be kept on the path to virtue by the elimination of all examples of vice, so the self-appointed guardians of contemporary culture have decided that “inclusion” is the virtue of our time, and all literature that might make the path to inclusion a bumpy one must be flattened, bulldozed, paved over.
Aside from a certain gruff nobility, the statue of John Witherspoon in Princeton is not overly stylized; he’s human, which is to say, flawed. A hero in bronze he may be, but with feet of clay, Witherspoon is worth remembering as he is portrayed there.
A call to repentance or prayer would not preclude action, but it would certainly force necessary and prudent reflection about the very problems Wolfe diagnoses and what the first response should be. Creating a deplorables basket of enemies on the political Left, while ignoring spiritual enemies, makes the project more political for sure, but not more Christian.
As the United States becomes increasingly divided over aid to Ukraine, it is more important than ever that the national conversation begin with the understanding that Ukraine is “the good guy” in this fight. The ability to view the Ukraine crisis with moral clarity is essential, not just for crafting a successful foreign policy, but for reaffirming America’s own principles.
During your time in college and for the rest of your life, you will encounter many people who have been wounded by lies and sin and are desperate for the truth, even if they don’t know it. Study well so that you can tend to them like the Good Samaritan did to the man by the side of the road.
If a post-Roe future is defined by even deeper divisions and bare-knuckle election politics, and not by a cultural shift in our thinking about how to not only protect innocent life but to support the parents who give and nurture that life, then we will have failed—again.