Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their e...
For the great Gaels of Ireland, wrote G. K. Chesterton, Are the men that God made mad.For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.
In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least (venial) to the most serious (mortal), to those so grav...
But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescr...
The real purpose of religion—at the popular level—was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let’s all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same ste...
In the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the most learned and nimble interpreter of antiquity in our age: All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central govern...
In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition mus...
There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers.
In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a cl...
If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero’s speeches are language as practical tool.
Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it.
Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure—the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Roman...
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imaginati...
The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as glamour. In other words, whoever h...
Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.
The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the cheap grace of the majority of German Christians in favor of the costly grace that linked Christian belief to s...
Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for a...
Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good...
Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy,...
What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not...