The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

1

Choose Right Over Kind

Finding an appropriate selection for “Family Movie Night” can be a vexing experience for the Christian household these days. Not only must one sift through the filth that comprises most of pop culture, but I find that even some movies I recall fondly from years past have moments that I would rather not share with my eight-year-old daughter.

0

Greece in January?

I am exploring the possibility of a Greek adventure in January.  The plan is for three to four days in Athens and roughly the same amount of time in the Peloponnese.  The highlights of  the stay in Athens would include the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum, the Archeological Museum, the ancient Agora, the Kerameikos Cemetery, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  We are also considering a bus trip out to Cape Sounion to visit the Temple of Poseidon.

10

What Is Paleoconservatism? Part IV: From Ideological Patchwork to a Philosophy of Human Nature

As it took shape, “paleoconservatism”—like all ideologies—was a piece of bric à brac, cobbled together with pieces from 1950’s liberalism that flew the false flag of conservatism, from which it took hostility to big government, public indecency, and abortion rights; from the misnamed ‘old right,’ from which it borrowed opposition to imperial wars; from the Libertarians, who strongly influenced—most obviously—our anti-imperialism, as well as the emphasis on individual liberty and non-governmental solutions to social problems, and from the populist traditions a suspicion of the ruling elite and a respect for the opinions of ordinary people whose brains had not been...

2

Poem: St. Francis

Friday is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi.  This crude poem–sometimes described as a piece of rhyming prose– is written in Umbrian, an Italian dialect distinct from but not too different from the Florentine Tuscan that Dante made  the language of Italian literature

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Wednesday’s Child: Gender Reveal  

The political Right, both in the United States and in Europe, has come to perceive the professed worldview of Russia’s ruling junta as a conservative antidote to the poison of modernity, a somber counterweight to the West’s cartoonish decline, and an infusion of plain old horse sense to arrest its slide into liberal dementia.  To be sure, the poison and the decline and the dementia are all very much in evidence, yet the plain old horse sense issuing from the mighty steppes west of the Urals, alas, is just demagoguery – eyewash and bunkum on a par with the Soviet...

2

Isn’t It Romantic?

It is dangerous to associate oneself with the term “romantic,” lest one be labeled a sentimental fool, a Don Juan, Taugenichts or a heretic from someone’s orthodoxy; I do, however, reluctantly claim the epithet. From childhood, in my earliest memories, I apprehended, although I certainly did not comprehend, that God, who is wholly other, was nevertheless, paradoxically, immanent in nature – the cosmic order. I thus developed a sense of awe which anticipated an impending encounter. As I matured, I came to understand, that nature was therefore a mediator, a sacramental element between God and man. It was at a...