TWE

Miscellaneous snippets about one of the greatest literary post men of the twentieth century In those early years of the twentieth century, a quick-moving age that was experiencing the fruits of industrialization and new trends, he pushed for tradition. He argued for the need to preserve the family and to

"A great division among the American people has begun--gradually, slowly--to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between 'conservatives' and 'liberals,' but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not." John Lukacs,

Dogma Man A few years ago, I was talking with an acquaintance about George Roche's resignation as president of Hillsdale College in light of allegations that he'd been engaged in an affair with his daughter-in-law. My acquaintance was outraged by the idea that Hillsdale College may

Good Christians are many, if it weren't for all those maddening people: the whiners, the manipulators, the crooks, the liars, the heretics, the greedy. But Christ put up with all of them and remained sinless. The Bible recounts disciple buffoonery and selfishness, yet Christ communed with them, loved

Essayist Joseph Epstein once described reading as a "lovely, antisocial, splendidly selfish habit." Selfish? I suppose so, but could one be so unselfish as to deny himself the pleasures of the mind and strengthening of the soul that come from reading? I'm reminded of Josef Pieper&

"As soon as a man satisfies his desire by obtaining what he wants, he starts to desire something else and finds himself empty again; and if he satisfies his desire with this, he becomes empty once again and ready for still another. And this never stops until we depart

"When man's irrational passions are thriving he is not free to pray and to seek the word of God." Evagrius. Many others, including Augustine, would say that, when a man's irrational passions are thriving, he is not free, period.

Thoughts are serious. Don't entertain them, unless you want to be them.

"I used to believe, with regard to any problem whatever, that to know was to solve the problem; now I realize that it means to know how the problem concerns me." Simone Weil

You ever wonder why people on vacation often have a bad time? I do, and I've concluded that–absent obvious things, like flat tires, or missing one's plane, or getting abducted like that family in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard