This Thanksgiving holiday provided a striking example of political correctness at its worst, aiming at undercutting our nation's history and traditions and engaging in the usual over-embellishing of one of the Left’s favored minority groups and denigration of the majority. In this case, the favored group was American Indians and the denigrated group was, of [...]

There are some occasions when the editorial “we” is almost viscerally inadequate. Writing about my friend Peter Collier—the prolific biographer and novelist, literary impresario, and tireless cultural warrior—is one such. Although he made it a full decade beyond the biblically sanctioned allotment of three score and ten, the announcement early last month that Peter had [...]

Like a bird, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter built his nest high—up on the slopes of the Austrian mountains in the village of St. Radegund. Franz and his wife Franziska were living in an edenic alpine village amid all that is green and fresh. There, they quietly raised their three daughters, worked the fields, and loved each [...]

Published seventy years ago, in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a modern classic. As Americans in the Age of Oligarchy acquiesce to a mutable truth—a gospel according to Google—George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare is creeping into the American dream. Politicians openly lie. “Fake news” riddles the media. Moral relativism commonly and craftily validates immorality. It is all [...]

Thirty-six years ago a small slim book crossed my desk at the offices of National Review in Manhattan. Its title was The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism; its author, Michael D. Aeschliman. I slipped it into my briefcase and began reading it over a martini on the flight back to Wyoming. At home, I finished [...]

It is a rare pleasure to be able to write in full-throated commendation of a signal event at an important academic institution. Last month, Hillsdale College marked its 175th anniversary by dedicating Christ Chapel, a magnificent new building designed by the distinguished ecclesiastical architect Duncan Stroik, a professor of architecture at Notre Dame. The chastely [...]

“Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded . . . fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present... A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves [...]

One of the most encouraging developments in the Church in recent years has been the emergence of good, solid prelates from Africa. One thinks of Cardinal Arinze, whom many had thought might become the first African pope, and now there is the indomitable Robert Cardinal Sarah, whose forthright and courageous stance against much of the [...]

What makes worship in the Catholic Church of 2019 different from everything else one experiences during the week—a place of true spiritual, intellectual, and emotional respite? We genuflect and kneel, and foster a spirit of quiet reverence because Jesus is truly present in the tabernacle and on the altar. External factors can bolster this catechesis: [...]

Certainly within Catholic circles, a film about the latest, most significant spiritual devotion—the Divine Mercy image and Chaplet—has been much anticipated, and if the nearly-full theatre where I viewed the film is any indication, its premier showing was well attended in a limited theatrical release. Due to popular demand, the film is scheduled for an [...]

Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in the April 2002 print edition of Crisis. It has been edited for brevity. Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the [...]

A few decades ago, I had lunch with Daniel Carroll in Howard County, Maryland, during which he used a pop-up toaster in his grand dining room, which was hung with ancestral portraits. There were many such portraits, for Dan was a direct descendant of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll [...]

Several Sundays ago, our parish priest devoted his sermon to the subject of evil, which he argued has reached historic levels in the world today. A couple of weeks later, my local paper, The Laramie Boomerang, printed a front-page story about the forthcoming weeklong series of events preceding Hallowe’en (nowadays “Halloween” or “Holloween”) called “Scaramie,” [...]

Have you ever dared to go inside one of those Halloween outlets that crop up a month before October 31? Besides high-priced trash, these shops offer an insight into what Dante might have conceived for our times in his Inferno, portraying the horrors and monstrosities that are housed in the heart of our society with [...]

A recent film, All Is True, released this past May and starring Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare and Ian McKellen as Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, purports to be a depiction of the Bard’s final years in Stratford-upon-Avon following his retirement from the London stage. Making no effort to remain true to the known facts [...]

Editor’s note: in this fascinating interview with Crisis Magazine, the acclaimed novelist Walker Percy discusses the vocations crisis, abortion, Vatican II, popes, and (of course) literature. The interview originally appeared in the July 1989 print edition of Crisis. It has been edited for brevity. CRISIS: There is tremendous intellectual opposition in the Church to Pope [...]

The canonization of John Henry Newman in Rome on October 13 will be a triumph for the light of life and love amidst the gloom and darkness of the Culture of Death. It will signify the way in which the Church transcends and outlives the evil forces that assail her, whether such assailants are the [...]

In May of this year, the newly elected United Conservative Party government of the province of Alberta directed all accredited colleges and universities in the province to adopt policies protecting freedom of expression on campus. Although each school must compose its own statement upholding free-speech rights within the specific context and institutional culture, the famous [...]

Due to teenage activist Greta Thunberg’s thunderous—and divisive—speech to the United Nations last week, climate change is getting another moment in the sun. It may be tempting to brush off her comments as youthful hyperbole, but Thunberg’s speech does not stand alone. She’s the most prominent figure in a worldwide movement of young people who [...]

After Colin Clive uttered his mad crescendo of “It’s alive!” in the 1931 film Frankenstein, he screamed a line that censorship boards judged as blasphemous. So, a thunderclap was added to obscure him raving, “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” Shocking. What’s even more shocking is that there was such sensitivity [...]