Gilbert Meilaender

Pondering the endless glut of books on the virtues of nationalism and the failures of political liberalism, I sat up late the other night, reading around (yet again) in Augustine’s City of God before dozing off in my chair. Waking suddenly—or, at least, half-awake—my mind was . . . . Continue Reading »

Not too many years ago, I knew a little boy who was prone to temper tantrums that included yelling, kicking, and hitting. He wasn’t entirely to blame for this, having had a rough start in life. Nevertheless, that sort of behavior couldn’t just be excused, and, of course, if uncorrected it would . . . . Continue Reading »

In his famous speech (in Acts 17) to “men of Athens” at the ­Areopagus, St. Paul speaks of the providential ordering of God as including different nations, each having its particular boundaries. God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having . . . . Continue Reading »

At the end of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus and ­Cassius, the conspirators who had assassinated Caesar, are themselves dead. Brutus has, in fact, fallen upon his sword rather than face capture by the armies of Octavius and Mark Antony. Brutus was bad enough to betray and murder a . . . . Continue Reading »

In this 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, there are countless angles from which to think about that event and its continuing significance. By no means the least important is the fact that Luther’s Reformation in particular was in many respects a university-based movement. And still in our . . . . Continue Reading »

C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Lawby justin buckley dyer and micah j. watsoncambridge, 170 pages, $44.99 Of the making of books about C. S. Lewis there is no end. Although interest in his thought receded somewhat in the decade or so after his death in 1963, it gradually recovered, has grown . . . . Continue Reading »

A recollection from my childhood: In the (relatively) small Midwestern town in which I grew up, many businesses would close on Good Friday from noon to 3:00 p.m. More than a few of the employees would spend that time in church before returning to work for what remained of the afternoon. At the time . . . . Continue Reading »

The year 2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Veritatis Splendor, surely one of the most significant encyclicals of Pope John Paul II. It offers a searching examination of the nature of the Christian life and Christian moral reflection. Although John Paul’s focus in the . . . . Continue Reading »

John Hall Wheelock, a minor twentieth-century poet—dubbed “the last romantic” in the title of his oral autobiography—captured movingly some of the reasons we desire more life, our sense (nevertheless) that a complete human life cannot mean an indefinitely extended one, and the pathos . . . . Continue Reading »

What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song edited by Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub ISI, 790 pages, $35 Writing early in the fifth century a.d. to bolster the spirits of Christians in chaotic political times, St. Augustine asked: “As for this mortal . . . . Continue Reading »