Popular culture in the West, and especially in North America, is an illusion, mostly electronic, that does not feed the soul.  Indeed, it claims to do nothing but feed the senses, and as such it tends toward universal barbarism, fostering ignorance and encouraging violence. Beneath the illusion there is, however, one great civilization, and it...

When peace came to Europe in 1815, Britain was in the unique position of possessing empire, wealth, and power, which would make possible a century of commercial and industrial growth and prosperity. There were disquieting signs, however. The capitalism that Mill and Ricardo would advance was entering a mature phase, so that the age of...

In classical times, the city was a sacred place, bounded by a wall, in which civilization occurred, and to live outside the city was to be uncivilized.  To be the founder of a city was to be god-like, so that there are at least six Alexandrias, the work of Alexander the Great; several Antiochs, named...

The two roots onto which Western Christendom was grafted proposed very different notions about depicting the gods.  The Greeks famously made images of Athena and Zeus, always depicting them as man writ large, and were untroubled by this glaring anthropomorphism.  Hebrew tradition, on the other hand, said nothing about making or worshiping images of God. ...

As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...