Articles

In the midst of whatever trials come to us and whatever revelations do not, we are still called to serve, to do good, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And to believe in the voice that may not choose to speak to us, to hold fast to the goodness given to our beloved but unseen by everyone else—that is the vocation of faith for many of us.

In short, we need to rely less on building rigid ideological superstructures and more on our guts, guts kept healthy by a diverse diet of conversation and friendship. We need to have more personal encounters and trust in the general “goodness” of people. In other words, we need to take the seriousness with which we treat this Left-Right stuff down a notch and lighten up!

Deep within the Western psyche and tradition is this yearning for return. Horace, more than any other of the grandiose poets of antiquity, captured that call, that cry, for return—a yearning for a restored Eden where the peaceful harmony of life in a garden would be our eternal home.

The most fashionable and defensible position on aesthetics is to maintain that beauty is entirely subjective. Beauty doesn't exist, we are assured, at least...

George Will has penned an end-of-year pick-me-up for conservatives, counseling them that the likely prospect of Republican Presidential electoral defeat in November (given their...

“The real wealth of a country … does not reside in the hectic exchanges on the stock market or the rivers of commodities that flow through every household without belonging there. It resides in local communities, in the work that holds them together, and the deep investment represented by a home, a place and the endowment across generations of human love.”

More interesting than the big-name hits and misses, though, are the everyday but often extraordinary people that she meets along the way. Some are firmly in the Trump camp; some are frustrated by their friends who are; and some are somewhere in the complicated middle.

Scialabba insists that our actions are meritorious and good if they are effective, if they transform society and lead to measurable improvements. Berry, on the other hand, upholds love as its own standard: human lives are good insofar as they participate in divine love’s redemptive work.

Heidegger’s life and work are a lesson to so many confused, angry, and lonely young Western people today who feel out of place in a toxic post-millennial world torn by ethnic and religious strife and who are attracted to various strains of noxious neo-pagan and hate-filled thought.

Wilfred M. McClay, Bethany Hebbard, and Jake Meador consider what recent trends—considered at the local, regional, and global scales—give reason for hope in 2020.