November 29, 2018
by Paul Krause
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” The opening words to Homer’s Odyssey are among the most famous and recognizable in Western literature. That beginning stanza captures so much of the human condition and [...]
January 12, 2016
by Matt Fradd
If you haven’t yet read The Divine Comedy, the Year of Mercy is the time to do it. Named by Pope Francis as one of his favorite books, this narrative poem by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri is widely considered to be the most preeminent work of Italian literature, as well as one of the greatest poems ever written. [...]
June 5, 2014
by Anthony Esolen
“For all I am of poet,” says the stranger to the two men climbing the mountain of Purgatory, the Aeneid was my mama and my nurse; without it, all my work weighs not a dram. And I'd content to spend an extra year— could I have lived on earth when Virgil lived— suffering for my [...]
January 11, 2012
by Roger Scruton
The following essay is reprinted with the permission of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute from The Intercollegiate Review. T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition [...]
January 17, 2011
by Margaret Cabaniss
The author of a new book on Galileo claims that the scientist's greatest contribution to theoretical physics came about, ironically enough, from thinking about the dimensions of Dante's hell: In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many [...]
November 2, 2010
by Benjamin D. Wiker
This is not an article for those who are unabashedly in love with democracy, who look forward to election year with patriotic zeal directed first of all to the nation and second of all to one of the political parties. I write instead for the genuinely dispossessed: for those who feel deep in their bones [...]
September 30, 2010
by John Zmirak
This week I will take up the cudgels in defense of G. K. Chesterton, after reading Austin Bramwell's acerbic article that dismissed my beloved bard as philosophically unserious and rhetorically annoying. I'm probably not the man to take up the task, since I'm way too attached. Twenty years ago, I teased Robert Spencer, who wages [...]
July 17, 2010
by Marian Crowe
They're a vanishing breed, the sisters. Of course some are still around, but precious few, if the statistics I read are correct. And almost none of them teach school, wear long dresses and rosary beads that clack when they walk, and have names like Sister Humiliata and Sister Chrysostom. If your only knowledge of nuns [...]
May 25, 2010
by Alice von Hildebrand
God gave Adam and Eve dominion over the earth. This mission was confided to them, not to let it become stale but to make it bear fruit. They were called to take care of it, to tend it, and to develop it. Nature was the material, and man was to foster its development and to [...]
October 24, 2009
by Mark P. Shea
Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with a shocking dogmatic definition: We declare, [...]