Great Books

The Paradox of Courage

Up in the heights of the...

How Poetry Can Save Us in Our Age of Superficiality

Poetry will not improve our students' job prospects or make them better office workers, but it is more important now than ever to teach poetry because it offers a unique antidote to the superficiality that dominates American culture. Poetry calls us back to tradition and calls us...

Tradition: The Concept and Its Claim Upon Us

True unity among men must have its roots in that common participation in the holy tradition reaching back to an utterance of God Himself... One wonders whether tradition is not actually anti-historical. It stands in stark contrast...

Was Aristotle the Father of Radical Individualism?

A recent essay proposes Aristotle to have “opened a path” to today’s radical individualism and relativism. In order to evaluate this thesis, we must turn to the Great Tradition of the “perennial philosophy” and ask what the great philosophers taught about virtue, justice, friendship, and...

Banning Shakespeare: Exposing the Haters of Humanity

What are we to make of the call to ban Shakespeare and other dead white men because they are dead? It is time that those who have declared a neo-racist war on humanity be named and shamed. It is time to unite in defence of the humanities in the...

Leo Tolstoy’s Napoleon: Slave of History

Leo Tolstoy shows us the character of Napoleon and shows us the hope of near-repentance, and the devastatingly fearful return to a world of artificial phantoms... I recently wrote an essay about...

The Nietzschean Shakespeare

Friedrich Nietzsche has no explanation for the process by which Christianity conquered Rome, by which the strong accepted the morality of the weak. When it comes to a depth of understanding of the development of Christianity, William Shakespeare is the true superman...

Augustine’s “Confessions” Unpacked

Augustine's Confessions is first and foremost a prayer to God. Indeed, unless we read it as a prayer, we will not understand it; we will only study it... I Burned for Your...

The Ancients on the Use and Abuse of Alcohol

Modern philosophy, empirical science, and our social sciences stand mute before moral questions and the human spirit. Let us, therefore, turn to the Ancients for their understanding of alcohol's effects upon the soul... “What’s this chemical ferment called life all about? I shall be impelled to strong...

Do You Know What an Odyssey Is?

An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one's own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series...

How Aristotle Got Virtue Wrong

Aristotle’s reasoning about virtue, with its emphasis on man’s relationship to his own soul and man’s ability to perfect his own virtue, opened a path to relativism and radical individualism... All philosophical inquiry is united by two foundational elements....

The Uselessness of Liberal Education

If we want to live in a world where there are only means to other means with no end in sight, where only the kitsch consumerist monuments of selfish human will and desire exist, where all knowledge is ordered to use, then we must say goodbye to...

The Good Man’s Bad Cause: A Lesson From “Julius Caesar”

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all, ends his life working with people he cannot respect, haunted by visions of the friend he has murdered, and in a cause that fails and deserves to fail...

The Death of God and the New Stories

The narratives of science and Christianity are obviously not novels, nor works of fiction, for both claim to tell the true story of humankind—where we came from, what we are, and where we are going. To determine if either of these narratives is true, we must assess...