We must know how to trust great literature, which invites the deployment of intense and demanding feelings. The elevation of the soul of the youth suffers in the absence of great literary works; they remain constricted in an elementary vision of the world, of feelings, of relationships between people.

The numbers of Nigeria’s dead and displaced on account of recent violence vary widely, but in October of last year, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN International) was reporting anywhere between 3,000 and 36,000 people had been murdered.

What strikes one is Karl von Habsburg’s willingness to say things which—while entirely true—would not be said by any current politician. Moreover, it hints at a vision entirely in keeping with that of his Habsburg predecessors, yet once again altered to fit the vastly changed circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s late discovery of Christianity is an example for today’s conservative intellectuals.

My ‘microaggression’ was met with what might be deemed a ‘macroaggression.’ Whereas I was seeking no confrontation and sought not to make her or anyone else feel uncomfortable, she confronted me directly, specifically to make me feel uncomfortable—and she succeeded.

Another use of the imperial past is possible: one that does not collapse empire into nationality, one that assumes overlapping rather than contradicting spheres.

In my country of Great Britain, I am worried by those Muslims who use the country’s liberties and laws to undermine our civilisation and heritage. I went on a journey across the country to understand modern British Muslim culture, but I kept one eye on the history of Islamic civilisation, too. 

Trans activists wield an enormous amount of cultural power, and their ideology is far from discredited in the eyes of progressive politicians, delusional academics, and their media microphones. Yet, from the British Isles to the Continent to the Nordic nations, people are beginning to wake up.

In our own time, we have seen the rise of calls for Burkean ideals on the Left. Think only of the Social Democrats in the UK, a party that had some influence in the 1980s but are almost entirely unknown today, who are against the wokeism dominating the current political debate, and who seek to preserve local customs, and use the very conservative sounding slogan “family, community, nation” as their header on their website.

The Eid Charity’s spending across the West reveals a clear pattern of Qatari monies being handed out almost exclusively to radical organizations. Despite its extremist links, it has been able to operate internationally with near impunity.

Today, we might find Dune’s imagery allegorical. The world, or the public sphere, has in many respects been rendered inhospitable. The once baroque diversity of cultural forms has been drastically reduced. A desertscape has replaced the lush filigree characteristic of more traditional societies.

Once we have firmly established truth and beauty as the foundations of our educational efforts, we can start with undertaking the first and most difficult task in the educational adventure of making visible the hidden seed: character formation.

The deep-rooted conviction that men have lived for centuries under the obscurantist illusion that the Earth was flat is simply an invention of modernity.

One can pour money into a village, but if there are simply no businesses on which to spend it, those who receive that money will quickly use it to buy goods and services at a nearby city. Similarly, politics can promote values, but if we lack the communal context in which to exercise these and in which these might be passed on, nothing will come of it. Like rain on concrete, it may get the ground wet, but nothing will grow.

The Twelvetide is an open gate to benevolent magic, to mages and faeries, a time in which we may recognize what is exalted, as the wise men did, by exchanging gifts and thereby seeing exaltation in each other.

Never has libertarianism, a notoriously loud creed, been so hushed in its concern for liberty.

This is true individuality and true solidarity: We are all free lords subject to no one, yet also dutiful servants subject to everyone. Why? Because of the equal status of all human beings before God. We are all unworthy sinners, yet we are all worthy of salvation through trust in God. Thus, regardless of our earthly status, we all possess equal and inviolable dignity as individuals. And we are all called to solidarity in service to others.

Cancelled for denouncing Arab anti-Semitism, Bensoussan’s publicized trial has crystallized a larger malady that ails France’s intellectual life.

If conservatives seek to uphold the law of the home, it is because they consider it neither feasible nor desirable to transcend it. Hence, they defend the local over the universal and the familiar over the anonymous. Their attachment to their country is founded on reverence and fidelity to that place which made them, and whose geography, law and culture constitutes the fabric of their identity and the object of their true affection.

We should be open to receiving wholeness and beauty, open to the transcendent as it manifests in the bizarre fact of harmony, the startling presence of relationship. In this way we may manifest our oikos in all its coherence, its unity, and avoid developing the kind of resentment that would have us go about compulsively deconstructing our neighbor’s identity.

Any state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself. No state can survive if it consciously chooses to ignore these prerequisites. For the Serbs, the basis of their political life can only be found in the teachings of St. Sava. 

It is easy to see why short-term jobs are conquering the market. They allow people to experience the freedom and moral comfort of a small business, something far more traditional than any nine-to-five job. They are also the natural response to our age of the internet and globalisation, ever-changing circumstances, and the over-bureaucratised corporate cultures.

By insisting on cultural neutrality, by insisting that it merely baby-proofs every hard edge and socket, the new mentality rejects any account of the anatomy of the human mind. It does not care, or does not know how to care, whether aspects of our lives distort our nature.

An important lesson emerges from the mediated individualism of Mazo and Velázquez’s family portraits. Nascent elites inevitably seek recognition by assimilation into, not the total destruction of existing social categories. Just as the monarch and feudalism were replaced by a bourgeois meritocracy, likewise too today’s revolutionary levelers will seek as much to reimagine hierarchy as to abolish it.

The New Puritans feign an aversion to pride and idols only insofar as it serves their political ends. They should be rejected as menacing imposters. But we should also reject a more sincere application of Puritan principles.

Today, we have almost forgotten the Holy Roman Empire; yet it was the empire that determined the history of Europe for almost a thousand years, and which gave the Germans a common legal framework to develop. This framework—and the shared idea of a Christian Occident—are brought together in the Imperial Crown.

Vienna and New Orleans, despite everything, have remained themselves in the face of larger cultures, consciously or otherwise, attempting (with some success) to reduce them to mere sameness.

Dante Alighieri’s significance stems from his work and extends beyond it. He is the quintessential European figure, epitomising the different strands which make Europe a culturally rich and distinct continent.

The challenge before us is to decide whether we believe in a universe created by a loving God who called us into being and who has destined us for eternal Communion with Himself, or whether we think we can only be ‘free’ by making ourselves like God and imposing our will on our body and the world?

The Enlightenment had its fair share of such confusion. It was a time of truly scientific pursuits; of Voltaire’s brave and sharp remarks; of Hume’s observant rationality. But it also produced Rousseau, whose romantic view of freedom inspired generations of rebels. They thought that only monarchs and nobles could be oppressive, for they had not yet seen tyranny of the people.