Wednesday’s Child: Once Upon a Time in the North
As the gentle reader seems to have appreciated the trope of Sunday night in Modena as an abandoned mining town in a spaghetti western, I keep pushing it. But first, a scene from Palermo.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
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.
Will Elon’s Twitter Save OurDemocracy™?
Lately Senator Ed Markey has been threatening a congressional attack on Elon Musk’s neo-Twitter over “public health” concerns. He said, “Someone could impersonate the CDC for eight dollars, pay for it, not be authenticated and then on that site, say, ‘CDC says vaccinations are not good for you,’ That’s a public health and safety problem.”
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Modena
Sunday, ten in the evening, Piazza Roma in Modena. Not a soul in sight. At lunchtime, this, one of the city’s main squares overlooking the Palazzo Ducale, was swarming with people in their Sunday best. A skating rink had been set up for the children, their unsteady shuffle on the ice choreographed to Tchaikovsky and Lehar.
2022 FFSS Lectures Available Now, Listen to Samples
2022 Fleming Foundation Summer Seminar Lectures available now 99$ Through Christmas.
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.”
