M. D. Aeschliman

The remote Tuscan-Romagnolan mountains evince a world isolated from modernity, though that solitude likely won't last long.  Continue Reading »

After a teaching career of fifty years, I agree with E. D. Hirsch that the primary problem in American public education is not the high schools, but the poorly organized, ineffective elementary school curricula, including the idiotic books of childish fiction.  Continue Reading »

Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chesterton’s views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chesterton’s assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him. Continue Reading »

Both arrant trumpery and much of our current “Great Awakening” are lethal to Western civilization, of which we are the beneficiaries and should be the guardians. Continue Reading »

Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architecht of the Spiritual World by Robert D. Denham University of Virginia Press, 373 pages, $37.50 Northrop Frye was one of the half-dozen most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, and his wide-ranging mind brought him unusual prominence . . . . Continue Reading »

In The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis noted that nothing he could say would keep some people from saying that he was anti-science, a charge he was nevertheless eager to refute. In fact he had received the kind of philosophical education at Oxford that enabled him, like John Henry Newman before him, . . . . Continue Reading »

On January 22, 1991, the Roman phase of an investigatory process into the character and merits of John Henry Newman (1801-1890)-begun formally in 1958 in Birmingham, England-was completed with the decree by Pope John Paul II that Newman "had practiced the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, . . . . Continue Reading »

Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »

In the course of a very long life, Malcolm Muggeridge made many enemies, but he surely made more friends, among whom it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been included. His enemies could be found both to the left and to the right. Those on the left are easy to account for: by . . . . Continue Reading »

The Culture We Deserve by jacques barzun university press of new england, 185 pages, $19.95 “I have got materials toward a treatise,” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in September 1725, “proving the falsity of that definition of animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis . . . . Continue Reading »