culture

I’m in the final stretch of completing this book, which I should have finished weeks (or months!) ago. And I have a number of things I plan to post about as soon as possible. But […]

In the summer of 1901, Jacques Maritain (who would go on to become the most influential Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century) and his future wife Raïssa Oumançoff (a Jewish refugee from Russia, later a […]

The writer and philosopher Roger Scruton (www.roger-scruton.com) is perhaps most famous for being the scourge of the Left. Foregoing a conventional academic career, he has forged his own way and put his rare talents to […]

In a 1956 article in Commonweal magazine, “Stoicism in the South”, author Walker Percy wrote of “a momentous change which has taken place in a single generation”: namely, that until a few years ago, the […]

Planned Parenthood President and CEO Cecile Richards, testifying before the House Oversight Committee this week, finally admitted that not one of organization’s some 700 clinics is outfitted with a mammogram machine. This means, hopefully, the […]

In one of the early episodes of the BBC mini-series Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novel of the same name, there is a conversation between King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell about the […]

“Wolf Hall,” the BBC adaptation of Hillary Mantel’s novel about early Tudor England, began airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” Easter Sunday night. It’s brilliant television. It’s also a serious distortion of history. And it proves, […]

In the 1960s, contrary to the inherited wisdom of mankind, educators in general and Catholic educators, too, decided that having students memorize things was a terrible notion. If I recall, the thinking was that memorizing […]