History

The Coming Christian Renaissance

The linear conception of history is so seductive, even antagonistic groups like Enlightenment philosophers and Marxists adopt it. It pervades their attitude toward religion. Both believe society matures as it sheds its religious heritage. Infantile societies practice religion, but progressive…

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The Key to the Bastille: Learning from the Past with Benedict XVI

by Christopher O. Blum

“Show me what a man remembers of his past,” the late Fritz Wilhelmsen once said, “and I will tell you what kind of man he is.” Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelmsen was inclined to bold affirmation and even bolder denial, and…

In Aeternum: The England that Never Changes

by Joseph Pearce

Recent posts about the United States and England, and especially those concerned with the decline, decay and ultimate disintegration of England have prompted my musings on the mutability of nations and cultures. Is everything subject to change? If so, is…

The Return of History

by M.D. Aeschliman

The gruesome gorgon of Marxist historiography has been finally and thoroughly discredited by the very historical process in which it reposed ultimate faith for its own “scientific” vindication, yet this is a fact that a still largely Marxist, or Marxist-tainted,…

Pictures in a Cave

by Carolyn Moynihan

To one who has seldom given a thought to cavemen as a popular category, let alone to their proper scientific classification, last week’s news that they were painting pictures on cave walls more than 40,000 years ago required some intensive…

Progressive Inhumanity, Part Three: Hatred of the Past

by Anthony Esolen

I have long thought that the term “progressive” was a dodge, because no one could tell me exactly where we were supposed to be headed and why. It seemed to me that the term was teleological but without a telos,…

Russell Kirk on the Moral Imagination

by Russell Kirk

In the franchise bookshops of the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred eighty-one, the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. Yet no civilization rests forever content with literary boredom…

Christopher Dawson: Christ in History

by Gerald J. Russello

The following essay first appeared in the April 1996 edition of Crisis Magazine. It is part of today’s symposium on “the bourgeois spirit” as diagnosed by Dawson. See also Dawson’s essay, Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind, and Jeffrey Tucker’s reply,…

Hail, Sol Invictus!

by Michael Cook

Let’s imagine for a moment that Christmas had never happened and that the Roman Emperor Aurelian had succeeded in establishing the feast of Sol Invictus on December 25 back in the year 274 AD. Instead of Christmas, we would have…

Lessons of History?

by Thomas Sowell

It used to be common for people to urge us to learn “the lessons of history.” But history gets much less attention these days and, if there are any lessons that we are offered, they are more likely to…

Not Disruptive Enough

by Peter Augustine Lawler

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution Francis Fukuyama; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $25 Francis Fukuyama thinks big and always on the cutting edge. But he’s no windbag intellectual. He actually knows things; he works hard…

1943: The Diplomats’ Battle

by Rev. George W. Rutler

As Foreign Minister, and Viceroy of India before that, Lord Edward Halifax was the preferred choice of the Conservative Party and the King to succeed Chamberlain as Prime Minister, but he knew he was no match for Churchill and did…

A War Prevented: Pope John XXIII and the Cuban Missile Crisis

by Ronald J. Rychlak

The Holy See is the oldest continuing international organization in the world. Its Secretary of State office was established in 1486, and that is also when its first permanent representatives were established in Venice, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and…

An American Tailgunner in “Hell”

“Just existing became what was important,” says 87-year-old Frank Kravetz of Pittsburgh, captive of the “hell-hole” that was Nuremberg Prison Camp. “Yet even as I struggled with the day-to-day sadness and despair, I never once had any regrets that I…

What’s So Great About Catholicism?

by H. W. Crocker III

With its divine foundation, sanction, and mission, nothing could be more glorious than the Catholic Church. But, of course, many people — even many baptized Catholics — don’t see it that way. Yet when the sins of men — secular…

The Witness of Whittaker Chambers

by John C. Chalberg

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, Sam Tanenhaus, Modern Library, 1998, 638 pages, $20 It was early December 1948, and Congressman Richard Nixon was in the midst of the first of his “six crises.” For the moment this particular crisis was…

Anything But Anonymous: Shakespeare the Catholic

by Joseph Pearce

Almost five hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare remains one of the most important figures in human history. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Homer and Dante, he is part of the triumvirate of literary giants who straddle the centuries…

Climate Change, Galileo, and the New Inquisition

by George Cardinal Pell

Four centuries ago Galileo was condemned by the Papacy for promoting the theory of a heliocentric universe, because the science was in conflict with Biblical beliefs. Recently, Australian prelate Cardinal George Pell rang the changes on the belief versus science…

On this Crock

by Russell Shaw

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills, (2000) Doubleday, 328 pages, $25 When Pope John Paul II summoned Catholics to a “purification of memory” by facing up to faults, he spoke of a process that should engage us…

Henry Hyde Was Right, G.W. Bush Was Wrong

by Terence Jeffrey

Events unfolding in the Middle East are proving that Henry Hyde was right and George Bush was wrong on the wisdom of a foreign policy focused on promoting democracy. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in Hyde’s House International…

What Is It We Wish to Conserve?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

A conservative’s task in society is “to preserve a particular people, living in a particular place during a particular time.” Jack Hunter, in a review of this writer’s new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? thus…

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