Humpty Dumpty: The New Blasphemy
In a previous light-hearted exercise in “revenge fantasy,” we touched upon the secular/blasphemous misuse of words with strong religious or cultural roots.
Tagged: Christian
A Brief Account of Siena, Part II
In Tuscany, as in ancient Greece, neighborhoods and religious associations played a major part in the organization of everyday life. In Tuscany the church Parishes and the neighborhoods that grew around them, whether known as quartieri (quarters), sesti (sixths), or (in Rome and elsewhere) rioni were the locus of many activities, including the repair of roads and walls.
Tuscan Histories: The End of Lombard Italy
The Lombard kingdom, aiming at a unified Italy, was defeated by the combined forces of the papacy and the Church, but the summoning of the Franks was a disastrous mistake, and the Lombard Kingdom became the foundation of all subsequent Italian development.
Tuscan Histories II: The Etruscan Legacy
If Christianity is difficult to conceive without the Old Testament, then Christendom is an impossibility without the legacy of Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscans made no small contribution to the character and culture of Rome, though very little of the Etruscan legacy is obvious.
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.
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.
Reason vs. Passion
Robert E. Lee, who in so many ways epitomized the highest ideas of Christian civility, summed up the common feeling in his famous statement that, “Duty is the most sublime word in our language,” adding the injunction: “Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.”
