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Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. He is the author or translator of twenty-five books on culture, religion, and education, including, most recently, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord, and Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind (both from Ignatius Press).

 

 

Tattered Flag

E Pluribus Nihil

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We often assume that unity is the norm in human affairs, and strife the exception. But a cold-eyed view of history suggests the reverse. Unity is what needs the special cause, and today we lack the cause.

When Reason Does Not Suffice: Why Our Culture Still Accepts Abortion

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The pro-life movement is really asking for a moral revolution. If the child lives, the mother’s life will not be the same, because if we accept the principles that allow the child to live, none of our lives can be the same. There is no way to guarantee a world safe for the unborn child that is also a world of total sexual and economic autonomy. In any world in which autonomy is the highest ideal, the child—that incarnate sign of our dependence and existential poverty—must go.

What Mothers Cannot Give to Their Sons

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For the sake of boys and the families they must eventually lead, we must open our hearts and quit attempting to thrust upon them an unnatural and uninspiring commitment to sexual indifference.

Patrick Deneen, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and Libertas Idiotica

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We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

The Physiophobe: Modern Man Against Reality

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We are physiophobes: we are afraid of, or we detest, the way things are. We take no delight in the real. We do not revel in boys being boys and girls being girls, and their coming together in marriage, the real thing, to make children, real children.

After the Exile: Poetry and the Death of Culture

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We are a people now illiterate in a way that is unprecedented for the human race. We can decipher linguistic signs on a page, but we have no songs and immemorial stories in our hearts.

Higher Education in Hell

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A politicized education is illiberal by its own inner compulsions. It has almost the hideousness and chaos of hell itself, so inextricably coupled it is with the mire and passions of the passing day.

Love, Liberal Education, and the Secret of Human Identity

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True liberal education should teach us that we do not only give ourselves away: we become ourselves by the gift. We become who we are by forgetting to think about who we are.

Pronouns, Ordinary People, and the War over Reality

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Do not dismiss the pronominal wars as nonsense or assume that its warriors are merely daft.
Public Discourse

No Room for Sanity at the Inn: Stifling Democratic Debate over Same-Sex Marriage

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Democracy and common sense teach us to seek the truth by listening to one another. If we will not even provide a room for people who want to talk with one another because we do not like what they say, then democracy is impossible.
Public Discourse

The Practical Wisdom of Chief Justice Ellsworth: Reconsidering the Separation of Church and State

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If good morals are essential for a free republic to endure, and if a certain group of institutions successfully promote those morals, then it follows that a well-governed state may be friendly to those institutions—even if they are churches.
Public Discourse

Marriage Is Not a Water Fountain

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Segregation was based on irrational, peculiar prejudice. By contrast, protecting marriage between one man and one woman is based on universal truths about our human nature.
Public Discourse

The Illusion of Neutrality

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The secular state cannot be neutral in matters of religion.
Public Discourse

Where Is the Virtue?

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Our culture has become soft. We suppose that sex is too trivial to require virtue, yet we also believe it is so significant that to suggest any restraint upon its consensual exercise is an affront to the most important fount of human dignity.
Public Discourse

College Athletics and the Common Good

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If we looked at actual young men and women, and not abstractions, we might begin to think of other things besides the ratio of members of each sex participating in this or that activity. We might think about love.
Public Discourse

What a Progressive Used to Be

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In the past, progressives fought to defend the family because they understood that families protect us from the atomization and amalgamation that isolate and control us.
Public Discourse

Peonage for the Twenty-First Century

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The Common Core exists only because we have forgotten that parents have a right to educate their children. The state has no educational authority of its own apart from what parents delegate to it.
Public Discourse

Drunk, But Not on Whiskey

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We have the worst of both worlds: a Prohibitionary State that gives license to all kinds of evil, but that regulates and restricts actions that are not evil, to manage the chaos that results from the license.
Public Discourse

Freedom and Civility

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Law cannot replace a nation’s customs, manners, and traditions. Rather, it should strengthen them by corroborating and invigorating the ways of a people.
Public Discourse

The Moral Structure of Pedophilia

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In contemporary America, condemnation of pedophilia rests on sentiment and not on moral reasoning. Nobody can simultaneously explain why pedophilia is so vile and uphold the first commandment of the sexual revolution: Fulfill thy desires.
Public Discourse

A Pulpit for Bullies

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To campaign against the bullying of LGBT people as if disagreement with the gay lifestyle were an evil is itself a form of bullying.
Public Discourse

Negligence, Insensitivity, or Murder?

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Kermit Gosnell was not sentenced to life imprisonment for sloppiness, for insensitivity, for bad keepsakes, for a backed up drain, for fleas, or even for making women suffer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering three babies.
Public Discourse

A Boy’s Life with Unisex Scouts

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The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.
Public Discourse

Neither In the Jungle Nor Out of It

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Lust perverts language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive.
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