The Republic of Plato is paradoxical in so many ways. We are astonished to read it again and again to find it the most up-to-date of books. Perhaps no aspect of this famous work is more curious than Plato’s varied discussion of truth and falsity, of lying to oneself and to one’s polity. In Book … Read more
A good friend sent me something off the Scripps-Howard wires the other day, a Denver dateline about how Coors Brewery manages its sales. In the article, Peter Coors stated, “Believe it or not, in the beer industry any more, you’re not really selling beer. You’re selling packaging, and you’re selling image….” No doubt, this observation … Read more
The lesson from Isaiah at Midnight Mass on Christmas reads, “Thou has increased their joy and given them great gladness.” I am often struck by the fact that in Christianity joy and gladness are not so much a product of our own activities but something much more, something that happens when all that the Greeks … Read more
My editor called up the other day from the deep recesses of downtown South Bend to remind me that my column for the present issue of Crisis was due. At first I thought of doing something on Nietzsche, or Allan Bloom, or Josef Pieper, if for no other reason than that their books were sitting … Read more
Over the past ninety years or so the testing of the American experiment has involved the great question of the right role for the United States in world affairs. We are, by geography, history, and cultural inclination, a people perennially disposed toward isolationism. It is by no means a publicly settled issue whether the United … Read more
Once I asked Scott Walter about where to find available books by Josef Pieper, who remains, I think, the best, certainly the clearest, of Christian philosophers. Scott told me to try Thomas and Karen Loome, Booksellers. “All you need to tell them is what you want.” This procedure was generous enough, of course, but what … Read more
My brother Jack in Reno has a television set with about 26 channels on it. After switching to all 26 channels in rapid succession a couple of times one evening, I just about decided that when it comes to what is worth watching on TV, 26 times zero still equalled zero. Indeed, my dear mother … Read more
The Churches and Modern Political Violence Mr. Weigel’s essay was originally delivered to a conference on “Deception and Deterrence in ‘Wars of National Liberation,’ State—Sponsored Terrorism, and Other Forms of Secret Warfare,” sponsored by the American Bar Association. There is, in a sense, something odd about inviting a theologian (even one engaged in the public … Read more
During last spring’s academic semester, I taught a course in Classical Political Thought. One of the texts we used in this course was Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, which is based on Xeneophon’s Hiero. The classical treatments of tyranny, of course, are in Plato and Aristotle, but Xenephon is also of great value, especially in the … Read more
In his Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton, who as he tells us was in despair as a young man, decided finally that he had had enough of this pessimistic thought and had decided to revolt against it. He found very little help from the standard sources, he recalled: But as I was still thinking the thing out by … Read more
In an old Peanuts sketch, from a book Scott Walter once gave me, Linus and Charlie Brown are seen walking across the countryside. Linus says to Charlie, “I have a theological question. . . .” Next, they are seen, caps on, leaning on a stone fence, as Linus continues: “When you die and go to … Read more
Dennis Bartlett, in San Francisco, lent me his copy of A Spiritual Aeneid, which is Ronald Knox’s autobiography, first published in 1918. Dennis has a 1958 Sheed & Ward edition with a Preface by Evelyn Waugh. I actually intend to return this book someday. As I also have an edition of The Pastoral Sermons of … Read more
“For who will dare to say or believe that it was not in God’s power to prevent both angels and men from sinning? But God preferred to leave this in their power, and thus to show both what evil could be wrought by their pride, and what good by His grace.” —St. Augustine, City of … Read more
In Woody Allen’s film, Manhattan, someone remarked to Allen, playing the part of a somewhat confused intellectual, “Just who do you think you are — God or something?” Woody Allen turned pensive for a moment and replied, “Well, a fella has to have a role model of some sort, you know.” Almost the whole of … Read more
The question of the bourgeois involves a real issue which Christians cannot afford to shirk. For it is difficult to deny that there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization and between the mind of the bourgeois and the mind of Christ. But first let us admit that it is no use hunting … Read more
In G.K. Chesterton’s essay, “Dickens and Christmas,” we read that “in fighting for Christmas, he [Dickens] was fighting for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday.” What strikes me about this particular passage … Read more
Book III, Chapter 7 of St. Augustine’s Confessions is entitled, marvelously: He Deplores His Wretchedness, That Having Been Born Thirty-Two Years, He Had Not Yet Found Out The Truth. In a culture whose public (oftentimes even ecclesiastical) doctrine, is theoretical “pluralism” — that is, that there is no “truth” but one’s own private feelings — … Read more
In an interview this past April with Lucio Brunelli of the Italian Catholic magazine 30 Giorni, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described dissent among American Catholic moral theologians as the expression of a more pernicious disorder: a “bourgeois Christianity in which Christianity is no longer a spur toward new responses and new hope in the face of … Read more
My brother-in-law, Jerry Vertin, in Steven’s Point, Wisconsin, has a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan records. While I visited this summer, I was listening to the Yeoman of the Guard, which came with a printed libretto. In Act I, I came across the following passage of Jack Point: My masters, I pray you bear with … Read more
On Pentecost, 1986, John Paul II published a fundamental encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem, on the “Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World.” This encyclical is meant to be the third part of a series on the Trinity — still, as Frank Sheed used to remark, the most fascinating of topics to … Read more