When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the avant-garde was given diverse powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and, in some degree, Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
America… “not in any sense Christian” “….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain of scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57. Every four years, truths in America can change from one thing to another, even as the center – left’s quest to be the global hegemon… Read More America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.
Many hope Donald Trump has brought new hope and that he can avoid both anarchy and tyranny. When John Adams wrote, “A republic is a government of laws, not arbitrary rule” he very likely could not even conceive of the constantly evolving laws we know too well today, laws that evolve substantially, essentially, from one… Read More In the West today, there has been no stable law.
C. S. Lewis’ witty and insightful criticisms of scientism, of the notion that the scientific enterprise alone can discover truth, that it can take the place of religious authority, of philosophical insight, and in fact of the whole tradition of humane wisdom, is well known.1 What has been less noted is the critique which he… Read More C.S. Lewis’ Critique of Scientific Knowledge by Thomas Storck
Jefferson’s pagan longings: “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of… Read More Thomas Jefferson and the American Way
Apropos of everything: Because Martin Heidegger forsook his early roots in Thomistic [objective] Christian philosophy, the unapologetic Nazi who enjoyed philosophy was forced to create a new and eccentric philosophical superstructure [undecipherable and irrelevant to most human beings] to dodge the consequent existential void. It was necessary because his system toppled the Holy Trinity in… Read More Being and Bunk.
Understanding the Epistemological Foundations of Scientific Totalitarianism. by Phillip D. Collins. Scientific totalitarianism is certainly not a new topic in the halls of political science and history. Given its bloody legacy of democide (i.e., state-sanctioned genocide, mass murder, and politicide) and its prolific spread throughout the world, scientific totalitarianism remains a preoccupying sociopolitical phenomenon of… Read More The Faustian Face of Modern Science
The works of the controversial French Jesuit were formally censured by the Vatican in 1962. Edward Pentin | April 8, 2025 | National Catholic Register VATICAN CITY — The 70th anniversary of the death on April 10 of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the controversial French Jesuit whose works the Vatican formally censured in 1962, has given… Read More Teilhard de Chardin’s Ideas Find Resonance Inside the Vatican 70 Years After His Death
So-called ‘Liberals’ have a philosophical problem in this country and beyond. On the one hand they heartily indulge and enjoy the sexual anarchy granted by the succeeding regimes since the 1950’s and 1960’s; on the other hand they tend to deplore the lawlessness of American foreign policy / imperialism / warmaking. They do not see… Read More When the State is Ultimate
It is not decadent Enlightenment philosophy which brought the world prosperity but human ingenuity incrementally building on newer and newer inventions, little by little. What we do with this technology will make or destroy us. Elon Musk is not the way.
From the December 2024 New Oxford Review symposium Catholics and Political Life. 1. It is hard for me to understand how a nation can be an experiment. Such a notion presupposes that the United States is not actually a nation but an idea, something that underlies our many attempts, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush,… Read More Thomas Storck on the American Experiment
First Things Magazine. The last few weeks have offered some encouragement for the pro-life cause. Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska rejected pro-abortion ballot measures, the first such victories since Dobbs v. Jackson—a watershed moment worth celebrating. Moreover, Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat, after essentially running on abortion, offers considerable hope for pro-life politics. Yet despite this, the… Read More The Most Dangerous Moment For the U.S. Pro-Life Movement
And ‘Being Beethoven‘ a BBC documentary chronicling his genius, tragedies and glory. Also, Damian Thompson asks why didn’t Beethoven go to Mass? Too, How did Beethoven feel about Napoleon? And Missa Solemnis. Beethoven and the Catholic Church .By Michael De Sapio.Crisis Magazine. Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart form the great trinity… Read More Beethoven and the Catholic Church
Bad and evil ideas have been far more virulent in history than silver, gold, or geopolitical schemes. Our modern errors arose out of the weeds of bad Christian soil, fueled by concupiscence and backed by diverse and mighty powers. King Henry VIII’s ecclesial revolution in England, born in lust and ending in the vast dissolution of the… Read More Philosophers of the New Light
…the words of Benedict XVI in 2015, two years after his decision to resign due to failing health and insomnia. “As one sees the power of Antichrist spreading, one can only pray that the Lord will give us mighty shepherds to defend His Church against the power of evil in this hour of need.” It… Read More Rod Dreher on Benedict XVI and the Power of Antichrist
“The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States.” Pedro L. Gonzalez.Aug 25. “I’ve been reading The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State by Claes G. Ryn, first published in 1991. It’s a short but insightful polemic about the pernicious influence of neoconservatism—the “New Jacobinism”—on American… Read More Keeping Out the Jacobins
“The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism.” — Stuart Walton It is a sad fact… Read More Aesthetics, Relativism and the Enlightenment
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