Gone is the bombast of economic progress as a good in itself. It seems much of the Right has finally recovered from the hangover of an era in which it was necessary to evidence the superiority of Western capitalism over eastern Bolshevism.
Fred Dibnah, MBE, the late and great, was a steeplejack. He was also a self-taught engineer, a documentarian, and a daredevil who brought down exactly ninety disused industrial chimneys using—with rare exceptions—nothing but a hammer and chisel.
The champions of an imperial and of a national world order were and are sons to a mixed heritage. This essay explores the deeper compatibility of Europe’s Greco-Roman and Biblical inheritances, as well as of national political entities and broader universal commitments.
If a new framework for freedom is to emerge in the West, it must be recognizable. The stories of anchored freedom must be told, and they must be disseminated with the same adamance in mass culture, whenever and wherever possible, as the Boomer myth of freedom.
How is it, we may ask ourselves, sexuality is widely deemed something fluid, unless its fluidity runs towards heterosexuality, and then all of a sudden sexuality becomes a binary phenomenon that cannot undergo any change?
It is the ordinary nature of their goodness that makes the story of Le Chambon such a miracle. It was weathered men and women with brittle hands, shiny with callouses from backbreaking work, hard as oak and often gnarled with age, who did these things.
As I knelt to pray my rosary before the Blessed Sacrament, I was struck by the astonishing confidence required to build Sacré-Cœur. In 1789, France, the Church’s eldest daughter, declared herself no longer a disciple of Jesus Christ but an apostate.
If Europe is to enter a new, restorative cycle, it will not do merely to push against contemporary ‘woke’ elites and the consequences of mass immigration. Her defenders must attend to what drove some of her most perceptive sons and daughters away.
The ideal of responsibility is based on the simple assumption that with maturity should come a certain readiness to accept the sufferings and burdens of life with dignity. This, if you like, is part of the backbone of Western Civilization.
Humanity’s ongoing plastic saga suggests that mass production and mass disposability—the same process that replaces fabrication and craftsmanship with production—also reduces our ability to make ourselves, that is, to reproduce.
For the first time in many decades, German politicians must learn to think, rather than feel— and to assert Germany’s vital national interests.
Our dreary present, in its moralizing arrogance, believes it can judge countless generations of our ancestors, while refusing to even try and grasp the spiritual richness of our past.
