The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
What do we mean when we say “the great monotheistic religions”? Can we even grant the premise of the question? How can we reconcile admiration for classical culture, which was polytheistic, with the practice of Christianity, which is monotheistic? How did the early Christian fathers, including St. Augustine and Tertullian, examine this tension between Athens and Jerusalem? Can we argue that the timing of the Incarnation allowed for the Church to derive maximum benefit from Roman law and government and Greek philosophy? Dr. Thomas Fleming and host Stephen Heiner examine these and many other questions on this month’s episode. Original...
In this episode host Stephen Heiner and guest Dr. Thomas Fleming discuss the Eternal City: Rome. Topics covered include: What makes it “eternal”? What happened to Rome and the papal states during the so-called “unification” of Italy? Why is the Victor Emmanuel monument an eyesore? Piazza Navona: what you should know The beauty of the Baths of Caracalla and the Colosseum Some important tips for the visitor, including importantly, how to spot the best gelato and what kind of wine you might ask for The legendary museum endurance of Gail Fleming Why Rick Steves should be avoided Original Air Date:...
This piece was published in a very slightly different form in 1999. It is being offered free to our free subscribers, and I hope that they will enjoy it. I also hope that they will see their way to joining us more fully by subscribing to the website. If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time; post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude...
Germany and the rest of Western Europe are being invaded with weaponized immigration. It has become apparent that Germany, not to be confused with the Federal Republic of Germany which is an abstraction or a “firm” as those who still consider themselves Germans call it, has all but lost its soul. The objective correlative with its heritage has been broken by Nazi usurpation of much that was true and good and by the very effective supersecessionist reeducation program imposed on Germany after its defeat in WWII. Western liberalism was apparently more effective than the draconian real-existierende Sozialismus of communist East...
“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.” Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...
I was in the Metro. I looked down at the newspaper the man on my left was reading. It featured three characters. One, a Boris Johnson jumping up and screaming “F*#% Europe!” To his right a flustered and disturbed David Cameron wheels around, saying, “Trump?” To his right a French footman bows and says, in French, “No, it’s the Mayor of London…” Later that same day I was writing in a cafe and four tables over I heard snippets of a conversation in French in which the words “Boris” and “Brexit” featured prominently. It was the day after Boris had delivered...
From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends? Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light. Irina Stolyarova – such is...
The word is out from the highest bully pulpit in the land: Donald Trump will not be President. Why, because being President “is a serious job.” President Obama went on, by way of the via negativa, to define the presidency by saying: “It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing… It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.” It is pretty obvious that the President has been spending a lot of time looking at his image in the mirror, and...
Dear Readers Technology is supposed to be a tool we use. If it’s reliable, sometimes we can be shocked at its letting us down. Last week Dr. Fleming and I spent 45 minutes trying to get him properly and digitally into our virtual studio so we could record a podcast. We had performed the exact same actions just a few days earlier with absolutely zero trouble. Ah, the idiosyncrasies of our digital masters. Dr. Fleming showed remarkable patience throughout and while we could have persevered on that afternoon to try for a makeshift solution, he wisely relented, and planned a...
Here in Rome I read Midwestern news stories many hours late or, if the events took place at night, seven hours early. In the morning, while my distant neighbors were still asleep, I read about the machete-wielding maniac in Columbus, Ohio, who attacked the diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant. It was hard to get any hard facts. The one fact that stuck out was the image of the Israeli flag in the window of a restaurant named Nazareth, along with other symbols and words in Arabic. Some report did either report or conjecture that the owner had tried...
