Tag: tradition

Between these extremes, however, is free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the fractured and deracinated world in which we are living.

Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.

They know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a careful genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating source.

It is daunting to envision running a pleasant, blessed household. This is why we're not meant to do it alone. Women are meant to flock together, with their words and their hands, to keep one another safe and to make the world more joyful.

We should aim to conserve what is deepest and true, not just what happens to have immediately preceded the present. It should be the conservative’s task to reconnect the manner of our lives and the institutions of our civilization—schools, colleges, churches, governments—to the solid truths beneath the surface, peeling away the layers of mere convention to find the “permanent things.”

Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.”

Clapp’s ambitious study attempts a great deal within a comparatively brief compass. Unfortunately, some topics suffer as a result...How can one best understand the tension between individual moral responsibility (rooted in Protestantism) and an individual liberty which rejects external constraints?

This Realness, a touch of authentic mythology--much like Niggle who finally saw the Real Tree he had modeled his painting after throughout his life without knowing it--comes alive when the legends are approached the way they were intended to be: as if they were true. Here Myth becomes palpable. It walks on the borders of history. Reaching out, we can feel its potency, its beauty, and, as we look through the many traditions, come to know it more.

When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.

Bradley Birzer on Christian humanism, judging the past, memory, and gratitude.