Chesterton the Prophet
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Category: Free Content
Ancient Vengeance
It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.
Two Poems by Lionel Johnson
These two poems of Lionel Johnson, included by his friend William Butler Yeats in a little volume of 20 Poems of Lionel Johnson, attest to Johnson’s deep sense of the sacred.
Happy Thanksgiving, and All Praise to John Smith!
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. We are having a simple dinner: vegetables a la grecque–leeks, mushrooms, cucumbers; fresh turkey with corn bread , apple, onion, sage, and sausage stuffing; Southern green beans with bacon and onion cooked in broth; rice of course to honor South Carolina; and pecan pie.
Modern Philosophers Against Revenge
No argument drawn from biological necessity would impress philosophers who, since the Enlightenment, have often written as if man were either naturally good or was only weakly endowed with a bundle of propensities known by philosophers as human nature or, by Christians, as “the old Adam.”
From Golding’s Ovid
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
Civilization, by Dr. James Patrick
By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time
Poem by a Reactionary Bohemian
This poem by Alec Wilder was read at the composer’s funeral. Wilder is best known for several popular songs, especially “I’ll Be Around” (recorded by his friend Frank Sinatra) and “While We are Young,” but he also wrote chamber music pieces generally condemned as “unoriginal.”
Poem by Charles Williams
As I came up into the town
Wherein my father’s house abide,
I met a man in tattered gown,
In ragged garment blowing wide,
In Search of Honest Journalists
If we were to take on Diogenes as our role model, as we attempt to shine our light in the nooks and crannies of American journalism, whom could we name? To make the game more amusing, we should, in addition to picking out the eccentrics, also have to name a famous contemporary who typified the regime lackeys that are the true heirs of Pulitzer and Hearst.
