The world lost a tremendously important voice on January 12, 2020, when Sir Roger Scruton passed away. Like all great artists and critics, his spirit lives on, and it is fitting that the great aesthetician and music scholar has bequeathed to the world a final—and fitting—contribution of cultural analysis, music criticism, and Wagnerian scholarship. In Wagner’s … Read more
The White House recently released a draft of a proposed executive order, titled Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again. This unexpected proposal sounded a clarion call to restore “classical and traditional architecture styles” in the future construction of Federal Government buildings in the capital and throughout the nation’s heartland, and discourage the post-1950s Corbusian trends of … Read more
The Catholic Church lost a great ally on January 12 when conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton died at the age of 75 from cancer. Scruton was not Catholic but Anglican—the author of Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. Yet he was a friend of Rome, telling the Catholic Herald in 2015, … Read more
People often speak of places of sanctuary, where they feel most free and where they can “breathe.” One such place for me—a former high school teacher—is within the walls of a school. There is something invigorating and God-inspired in having people of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences exercise their minds around common subjects and principles, … Read more
The world is not good enough. It could be better. We all agree about that. There are disagreements over how bad it is, and what causes this inadequacy. A popular explanation is that all of the world’s problems are caused by oppression, the process by which the powerful exercise their supremacy over the weak. It … Read more
Let us come home at last to you, O Lord, for fear that we be lost. ∼ St. Augustine My recent conversion to Christianity (and although I was raised Catholic I feel the distance I’ve traveled in my spiritual journey warrants the name of conversion) has come about as the culmination of three different levels … Read more
Tourism, as anyone with a passport can tell you, has become a very big business, particularly in places that no longer thrive in the customary practices of industry and commerce. Take Genoa, for instance, one of Europe’s largest cities along the Mediterranean coast and still the grandest seaport in all Italy, whose bright and shiny … Read more