Anthony Esolen

“Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return,” said the Lord God to Adam after the first sin. It’s a fine translation of the Hebrew, that  dust;  it suggests transience and insubstantiality. By the nineteenth century, in Britain at least, the word came to denote garbage of . . . . Continue Reading »

Two workers at the Ministry of Truth, Smith and Syme, sit at a table in an underground canteen. They wolf down spoonfuls of a pink and gray stew, with spongy chunks vaguely reminiscent of meat. Then Syme, filled with zeal, describes for his comrade what a joy it is to eliminate words from the . . . . Continue Reading »

“In the Middle Ages,” said a candidate for a position in medieval literature at my college, “beauty was considered sinful.” Someone should have told Dante, who wrote that beauty is the prime attraction of the human soul, not to mention that he wrote a beautiful poem. Someone . . . . Continue Reading »

I await with great delight the first translation of the Novus Ordo Mass into English. The bland, Scripture-muffling, colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase American Catholics have had for forty years often was not a translation at all, nor even a paraphrase into English. It was a paraphrase into . . . . Continue Reading »

Which, I wonder, is the greater despair of the comedian? Is it the academic, or the journalist? There’s much to be said for the academic. It takes real comic genius to write as badly as a Jacques Derrida or a Julia Kristeva, with the turgidity of a decadent schoolman and none of the precision. It takes even more to listen to it with a straight face. But my money is on the journalist… . Continue Reading »

In the year 1215, at a place called Runnymede, the barons of England, having paused from their usual pastime of bickering with one another, allied themselves with another brotherhood, the bishops of the Church, to checkmate their own king. They compelled him to sign a document called Magna Carta. . . . . Continue Reading »

Yet we hunger for what such dismal utilitarian habits cannot supply. So we look to the soldier, who may well make his career in or from the service, yet who endures privations we can hardly imagine, and puts his life on the line for his fellows. It is a kind of rough charity, and immensely appealing… . Continue Reading »

It used to be commonplace to say of Shakespeare that his vision of human affairs was so comprehensive as to make it impossible for us to ascribe to him any certain and stable view at all… . Continue Reading »

Woodrow Wilson once remarked that the purpose of the modern university was to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible, fathers who had immersed themselves in business and could no longer see the grand sweep of history. Otherwise, their sons would be hard to enlist in the progressive . . . . Continue Reading »