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.
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
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.”
By way of prologue it is important to understand the relation and the difference Civilization and culture, for both are used to describe the complex of ideas and actions that define the life of a particular people in a particular place at a certain time
Nonetheless…if there is one thing we Americans take seriously, it is money But even on that most vital subject, we cannot bring ourselves to tell the truth.
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, it will be useful to reread Herodotus, particularly the books that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies.
Surveys of Western Civ usually convey the impression that Greek literature was dominated by Athenians and their Ionian Greek cousins.
On FB I am forever seeing disputes breaking out over various theological points, disputes between Catholics and Protestants of course, but also between Tridentine and Vatican II Catholics and between various schools of Protestant thought (Lutheran, Calvinist, Pre-millennialist).
The Homeric Mind: Introduction In this series, I want you to do your best to forget what have been told to believe. We are going to concentrate more on what the Greeks said about themselves, and, more than that, we are going to compare what they said with how they lived. In other words, we are going to do something like what an anthropologist does when he goes to visit an alien and primitive culture. We must set aside our preconceptions, interview the subjects, and observe their behavior. What we find may be shocking, but we shall report the truth,...
