The “why?” we ask of God receives its most persuasive answer in the beauty, the love, and the heroic devotion of human life.
Author: Mark Signorelli (Mark Signorelli)
Edmund Burke, Radical
Thomas Paine’s rationalistic emphasis on freedom, equality, and rights form the basis of our political discourse. Even so, Edmund Burke has something essential to teach us: the way we order our society will always be the consequence, first and foremost, of the way we love.
After Beauty
Just as our culture’s rejection of an essential human nature wreaked havoc on our moral thought, so too our rejection of the concept of form has made our artwork incoherent.
Experts and Virtuosi: A MacIntyrian Case for Excellence
True authority plays a necessary role in our moral lives, and, when it is distributed according to respectable standards of excellence, it ennobles both those who direct it and those who are directed by it.
He Was He, I Was I
Neo-Darwinian models of human behavior cannot provide us with authentic self-knowledge; we need to revive the humanist disciplines—rhetoric, the arts, history, and above all things, poetry.
Form and Transcendence: A Reply to Micah Mattix
The authentic story of modernism is not one of continuity and emulation, but of violent rupture and hostility to tradition. Art should be oriented toward beauty.
To Teach and Delight
Poetry establishes the polis, the ordered community, because poetry teaches men their “actual desires,” the desires that must be accommodated in any lasting and beneficial order. The second in a two-part series.
The Meaning of Modernism
Modernist poetry embodies the philosophical perspective of late liberal Western society, giving form to the conception of freedom divorced from essence, the theoretical primacy of the individual, and the broad skepticism towards any notion of a rational human nature. The first in a two-part series.