“Much may be said on both sides.”–Hark! I hear
A well known voice that murmurs in my ear,–
The voice of Candour.–Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party’s headlong rage.
If it comes to that, what is a woman? Mention of “Gender liquidity” brings to mind a recent article in The New York Post about Mount Holyoke College. It is the oldest women’s college in the country, perhaps in the world, having been founded by Mary Lyon in 1837, and it admits only women. Or does it?
A lively discussion of Walter Miller’s science fiction masterpiece, a future history in which mankind repeats the Dark Ages only to make the same mistakes again. Recorded: March 22, 2018 Original Air Date: May 2018 Show Run Time: 42 minutes Show Host(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming The Fleming Foundation · Boethius Book Club, Episode 11: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Part 1 Boethius Book Club℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2018. All Rights are Reserved.
A lively discussion of Walter Miller’s science fiction masterpiece, a future history in which mankind repeats the Dark Ages only to make the same mistakes again. Recorded: March 22, 2018 Original Air Date: May 2018 Show Run Time: 42 minutes Show Host(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming The Fleming Foundation · Boethius Book Club, Episode 12: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Part 2 Boethius Book Club℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2018. All Rights are Reserved.
In short, something like a late Romantic. Had Pasternak been born in England, he would now be remembered as the culmination of Romanticism, a poet taking to modern extreme that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which, famously, Wordsworth mentions in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. And politics, it would seem, had as little to do with any of this as automobile manufacturing or Olympic sports. Yet this was the same poet who, aged 41 in 1931, published an autobiography entitled Okhrannaya gramota, its title usually, and not incorrectly, translated into English as Safe Conduct. In speaking of a man who,...
I can still vividly recall my semester in Rome many years ago. Among the books we had brought to study that spring was Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I had purchased the beautifully bound Liberty Fund edition (from which I’ll quote below) and couldn’t wait to plumb these two essays that Dr. Pieper had written in the aftermath of World War II, a time in which, it might easily be thought, leisure was the last thing on anyone’s mind. While I remember enjoying Leisure, his ideas were not aimed at (and thus did not then entirely take hold...
One of the minor annoyances of growing old is the uncomfortable feeling that that less time we have left, the faster it seems to be going by. In a dying civilization the annoyance is aggravated by the constant awareness of how rapidly downhill everything is headed.
Full well I know – my friends – ye look on me
A living specter of my Father dead –
Had I not bourne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy –
Having spent a month machine-gunning the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms,” now the Democratic Party is taking a bead on the First Amendment right to “freedom of the press.” The Party is suing President Trump, Russia and Wikileaks over the bogus Russian interference in the 2016 election. As I have written on Fleming Foundation from the start of this nonsense in late 2016, the Russians couldn’t possibly have influenced the election’s outcome because it’s too difficult to figure out how to do it, even for Americans, let alone Muscovites. President Trump can defend himself and the Russians...
I think I first began to appreciate the problem presented by American individualism, when I had Thanksgiving dinner with a family of eccentrics. They had little or no connection to the small community where their house was located–they had picked the town, decades earlier, by throwing a dart at the map, and most of them had long since scattered across the country. They had picked their religions with almost the same insouciance: one was a Buddhist, another an atheist humanist, another (the only apparently sane member of the tribe) an Episcopalian, and another–a girl I had known in graduate school–a...
