It is these defenders of order that Birzer seeks to highlight. For people like myself, it is easy to feel like you are alone, watching the world burn, but not knowing what to do about it. I live in a state with a very small Christian minority. While I am thankful for the Christians I have in my life, we all know that we are, in the words of Russell Moore, a prophetic minority. Birzer’s work serves as an antidote and an encouragement. There is a vast tradition of those who have looked into the abyss but have remained strong. In fact, they have done more than that, they have created. They have harnessed pieces of the Good, True and Beautiful and presented them to us for our fortification and enjoyment.
— Read on www.enteringthepublicsquare.com/blog/book-review-beyond-tenebrae-christian-humanism-in-the-twilight-of-the-west

A more serious challenge came from English poet and historian Robert Conquest who charged Lewis and Charles Williams with holding and promoting totalitarian sympathies. While his criticism applied mainly to Williams, Lewis became a part of the controversy by praising Williams’s Arthurian poetry. The two men, Conquest claimed, willfully obscured the venerable mythology, thus rendering it and its story unintelligible to the average person. They turned the vast Arthurian legend into a “complex intellectual parlour game,” a gnostic jumble, accessible only to the Elect. In Williams (and, by inference, in Lewis), one finds “a genuine writer who has fully accepted a closed and monopolistic system of ideas and feelings, and what is more, puts it forthrightly with its libidinal component scarcely disguised.”[7] That which is intelligible advocates the use of violence “to bring in unbelievers” with human beings treated merely as a means to an end.[8] Lewis and Williams each promote a “psychology of totalitarianism—of hierarchy and sadism.”[9]
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/12/cs-lewis-his-critics-bradley-birzer.html

One of the bestselling and most popular rock groups of all time, Pink Floyd—in its various incarnations—released 15 studio albums between 1967 and 2014. Throughout it all, the band never stopped experimenting with sound, pioneers in psychedelic and progressive rock. Their eighth album, Dark Side of the Moon, sold over 45 million copies and remained consistently on the album charts for a decade and a half. Their eleventh album, The Wall, sold over 23 million copies in the United States alone and many, many more worldwide.

Over the last year, Pink Floyd’s stalwart guitarist, David Gilmour, has emerged as the grand and genteel statesman and gentleman of the rock world, donating his guitar collection to charity. Gilmour raised an astounding $21 million from that auction, including from the sale of his famous black Stratocaster used for “Comfortably Numb.”

Gilmour’s chosen charity? ClientEarth, a nonprofit that seeks to radically and fundamentally alter economic activity toward a more sustainable and “green” future. “The global climate crisis is the greatest challenge that humanity will ever face,” Gilmour tweeted, “and we are within a few years of the effects of global warming being irreversible.”
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/if-orwell-had-an-anthem-pink-floyd-would-have-produced-it/

Cicero took this line of argumentation much further—and with much greater depth—in his famous dialogue, On the Laws. Here, though, Cicero’s speaker claimed that through reason the universe is one with God, offering a sort of intelligent pantheism. “Thus we can assume that the universe must possess wisdom and that the element which holds together all that exists excels in perfect reason. From this we see that the universe is in fact God and that the vital force of the universe is held together by this divine nature.” In and through its own reason, the universe also moves toward perfection, order, and harmony. From its beginning, the universe was good and wise, and it only moves towards an even greater goodness, truth, and beauty. In our contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful, we humans become better. “Humans have emerged for contemplating and imitating the universe. We are certainly not perfect, but we are a part of perfection.”
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/12/how-think-about-god-pagan-mere-christianity-bradley-birzer.html

Even as Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have brought J. R. R. Tolkien’s imaginative creations to the masses, the underlying meaning of Middle-earth has remained o
— Read on isibooks.org/j-r-r-tolkien-s-sanctifying-myth-2124.html

Perhaps no modern thinker best represented these changes than did Thomas Hobbes. In his seminal work, Leviathan, Hobbes called for the creation of a “mortal god”—the Leviathan—to counter and augment the will of the “immortal god.” In his view of society, man was utterly and completely depraved, incapable of anything but self-interest and cannibalism. “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man,” he wrote. “For war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war as it is in the nature of weather.” As such, when men are left to their own devices, Hobbes laments, there can exist no industry, no agriculture, “no navigation; nor use of the commodities that may be imported by the sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The immortal god, Hobbes admits, has bestowed upon each of the natural right and liberty of self-preservation. Rather, however, than seeing this right as extending to all of mankind, we selfishly hoard the natural right for ourselves and use it as a pretext for violence upon and against our neighbor.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/12/hobbes-leviathan-collectivist-horror-bradley-birzer.html

Aristocrat. Catholic. Patriot. Founder.

Before his death in 1832, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence—was widely regarded as one of the most important Founders.
— Read on isibooks.org/books/american-cicero.html

Where did you attend college? Notre Dame for undergrad. Indiana Uni­versity for graduate school. How did you propose to your wife? I wrote out 95 reasons why she should marry me and posted them on the cathedral door in Helena, Montana because she was Lutheran. I took her there at about 20 minutes to mid­night on Feb­ruary 12th of 1998. She said yes. If you were on a desert island, what three books would you bring? “The Lord of the Rings,” the Bible, and “City of God.” You’re on a desert island and get access to one website.  What do you choose? The Imag­i­native Con­ser­v­ative. Would you rather climb Mount Everest or go to the bottom of the ocean in a sub­marine? Everest. Do you have any super­sti­tions? I believe in ghosts.
— Read on hillsdalecollegian.com/2019/12/quick-hits-bradley-birzer-a-weekly-rapid-fire-interview/

When I was a kid, I loved, loved the Sears Wish Book. It was a catalog full of toys and games and pajamas and other stuff kids might want to put on their gift-request lists. I can still smell the ink on the paper of the Wish Book. I want that Star Wars toy and this video game and, no, I don’t want that pillow, c’mon mom, who wants a pillow for Christmas?

Clearly someone at Amazon has been thinking of the power of colorful print catalogs to promote products, because last month, we got an 89-page catalog from Amazon in our mailbox, titled “Play Together: Amazon’s Ultimate Wish List for Kids!”
— Read on sixcolors.com/post/2019/12/amazons-mystifying-paper-catalogs/