Words, Not Deeds: The New Measure of Virtue
Virtue-signalling is not new. But it has enjoyed a special burgeoning in recent decades, not least because modern culture sooner rewards noisy displays of passion than less visible acts of virtue.
Virtue-signalling is not new. But it has enjoyed a special burgeoning in recent decades, not least because modern culture sooner rewards noisy displays of passion than less visible acts of virtue.
Today, the image of the cave is regarded with suspicion. It seems to call for rule by experts and social engineers, for a tyranny of technocrats: a dubious, if not diabolical, prospect.
The difference between NATO and the United Nations is pluralism. The UN Charter is explicitly predicated on the sovereign equality of states. It is an ideal, to be sure, perhaps more honoured in the breach than the observance, but NATO’s ideal is the opposite.
The revolutionary afterlife of Hegel’s political thought is proof of the power of a philosophical system, once seized by less cautious hands, to outpace its original creator.
The hunt is almost the perfect antithesis of the ‘online community.’ In the hunting community, we know little of each other’s opinions. Our bond is not established by views or factions, but by our experience of belonging.
Wendell Berry’s stories are an effective evocation of the world he loves and wishes to defend; as one friend put it to me: “His stories make me love what I should love and hate what I should hate.”
In a span of a few weeks, I was confronted with two distinct views on death and two distinct ways of dying. In one was the illusion of self-mastery; in the other, the radical surrender of self.
Is Hegel’s political thought conservative, progressive, perhaps even revolutionary?
In an old hand-written Jesuit journal and a couple of letters, guarded in the Sanctuary of Loyola’s historical archive in Spain, I found a story of grace, love of God, and generosity that my family lore had already forgotten.
Where there is a human rights regime, especially if it is an international one as in Europe, the legal system is no longer rooted in social reality. It is no longer constitutive or protective of that reality; it becomes, on the contrary, an instrument for reforming or deforming it.
The survival of any traditional institution requires that, during historically critical moments, it remembers its reason for being, renewing its covenant with those it represents. Otherwise, it risks vacuity.
Those who are contemptuous of Christian civilisation continue their assault on our spiritual heritage. Defending it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify to those for whom erasing its traces from the public sphere has become a point of honour.
The victory this week of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni fits into this story as well. Her words—and perhaps, in the future, by the grace of God, her party’s actions—are nothing less than a full-throated disavowal of the West’s Chronos Complex.
Evil leadership is no leadership at all. Nor is insane nor stupid leadership either. So let us look at their opposite qualities, which in fact define real, true leadership.
There are inordinately excitable Catholics who believe that only a Catholic sovereign is owed their loyalty and devotion. I remind them of the commandment of St. Peter: “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the Emperor.”
The theft of the “Just Judges” panel of the Ghent Altarpiece is still unsolved. In the first of a series of essays, the story begins.
The Golden Bull of 1222 is a unique charter, as it was issued as a result of popular movements of the common nobility to defend and restore supposedly old customs and liberties, in the face of activities of the king and barons they perceived as harmful.
The fundamental tragedy of progressive and media malfeasance is that the very real plight of millions of Ukrainians is being lost in the social media roar.
The term ‘goblin mode’ has recently entered Internet-parlance, describing an apparently quarantine-inspired attitude of slovenliness and near-abject embrace of circadian-pattern irregularity, novelty-addicted internet scrolling, and abnegation of hygiene, countering Instagram-curated photography with a defeated, devil-may-care nihilism.
Serbia’s pro-life groups recently celebrated a landmark victory with the cancellation of the ‘Europride March,’ scheduled for September 17th. Following organized protests, in which throngs of people gathered several times on the streets of Belgrade, Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, was forced to cancel the notoriously sensualist parade. However, exhibitions, film screenings, and a four-day international […]
There are other domains of human life that I believe are best viewed as commons, as emergent, critical societal assets prone to careless destruction by unsustainable use, less tangible than pasture land, but in many ways, much more important in our daily lives.
One way to limit how much insanity one absorbs is to simply limit our exposure. But this is merely a stopgap. One needs interior fortification to navigate the maze of madness, and this fortification can and should range from the silly to the sublime.
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