Free Republic

The artist Evelyn Kreinecker, shows a new view of Christian male images of the Creator and Redeemer in her series of works "SHE". This presentation in the church of St. Wolfgang in Kanning in Ernsthofen is exciting and coherent..

I’ve always been fascinated by the imagery of the phoenix as it is found in various ancient mythologies. Though most typically associated with Greek mythology, the phoenix, under various names, could be found in mythological systems ranging from the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Arabian to the Armenian and beyond. The phoenix represents an older, Traditional way of looking at time, and therefore the world around us. This more Traditional view of time, as expressed across many different cultures for thousands of years, also found expression in conceptually related mythologies such as that of the ouroborus, the self-devouring worm...

We're so immersed in the "Safety First!" mindset that we take it as axiomatic. The slogan is repeated endlessly. I've been hearing it since grade school. We all have. Its effects are everywhere. Playground equipment removed from schools. No Smoking signs in bars (and restaurants, and airplanes, and shopping malls, and cafes ... but bars). Speed limits and seat-belt laws and bicycle helmet mandates. Warning signs on public transit cautioning against exiting the vehicle while it's still moving. Workplace safety guidelines and environmental impact assessments and insurance compliance regulations that make it nearly impossible to build anything. "Safe spaces" in...

E Pluribus Unum worked in the past but now multiculturalism has turned it around on itself, so that many voices out of one (Plures Ex Uno) are a Babel of sins destroying The West. A conservative reformation is the path I see to save us. Harnessing the inherently good faiths values of more than one culture to oppose stupidity and reassert true human life in God, family and community.

It was in the years following the Civil War, America was hard on the path to “becoming great.” The industrial revolution had moved into full swing, railroads criss-crossed the country, immigration was gaining speed, and wealth was accumulating at a rate never seen before. We were slowly moving from our original agrarian economy towards life as an industrial nation. The middle-class was growing, education was increasing, and the life of management was the aspiration of many. We were also getting sick in new ways. In 1868, the first article on the term neurasthenia was published. Though the word had been...

This past year, my wife and I developed a delightful habit of “Monday’s with Eli.” He is my soon-to-be 5 year-old grandson. He has a nearly 4 month-old baby brother, whose time in the womb was the occasion for our weekly baby-sitting duties. With my retirement, his presence was a new challenge to “find things to do.” He is an energetic boy, bright, with quick interest in almost anything around him. Our duties took us on long walks in the local arboretum, visits to the local dam, a train-yard, and countless forays into the woods across the street. There have...

Eric Voegelin on Gnostic Modernity A previous essay to this one on José Ortega y Gasset began with the claim that the past speaks to the present more pertinently than the present speaks to itself, but that the present, in assessing itself as the culmination of human advancement, actively disdains the past and prefers to stuff its ears. The essence of the modern psyche – which Ortega explores in his Revolt of the Masses (1930) – is paradoxically to be at once emphatically assured of its knowledge and wisdom but, in Ortega’s phrase, conscientiously ignorant of anything outside its radically...

“No one will know what you’re doing.” I recently took an evening for a movie – a fairly rare undertaking. The movie was Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, which depicts the story of a Catholic man and his family who refused to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler during World War II. He dies a martyr. The story is based in truth. Living in a small valley in the mountains of Austria, his life was already a hidden thing. When his refusal to cooperate with the demands of the State come to light, he begins to hear the mantra,...

If you lurk around social media, particularly in conservative conversations, you will have undoubtedly seen something about recent statements on the part of a minor Democratic candidate for the Presidential nomination. I have no interest in the politics of the matter. However, the exchange goes to the heart of the modern impulse and serves as an excellent example of modernity’s dangers. The exchange: Don Lemon: Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same sex marriage? O’Rourke: Yes. There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break, for...

In a recent talk for the C.S. Lewis Institute, Os Guinness laments, "It isn’t ideas which have caused the main damage to the church,” Guinness says. “Modernity itself has done more damage to the church than all the persecutors put together..." The Chinese church survived the most brutal, vicious, systematic persecution any church has probably ever faced under Mao Ze Dung. And yet now, when they’re not persecuted so visiously….as they’re moving to big cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, the challenge of the church negotiating these big modern cities is actually causing many to fall away. The challenge of negotiating...

One of the biggest mysteries that plagues the world of neoconservatism is the question of why the end of history – that final triumph of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism – hasn’t occurred yet. All around the world in many different cultures and nations there is a strenuous reaction against these very things. Indeed, even in the western core – Western Europe and the Anglosphere – there is increasing skepticism about these tenets of the Enlightenment. The question which the neoconservatives ask is, “Why do they hate us?” This question increasingly applies to pretty much everybody all over the world,...

There is a class that most college students will take at one point in their academic career. It is the course on Western Civilization—“Western Civ” for short. It is a feeble attempt to supplement the modern college curriculum (typically in two freshman-level courses) with what used to be the very backbone of a liberal education. The course revolves around classics of the Western Tradition: Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ Meditations, and Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. But one text in particular, I think, has been subject to mistreatment and misuse—the Holy Bible.The problem is simple. One of...

Rachel A. Dolezal, the recently resigned president of the Spokane, Washington, office of the NAACP, has come under a bit of controversy. Both of her parents are white, but for eight years, Dolezal claimed that she was black. In addition to her role as president of an NAACP chapter, Dolezal was an instructor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. Some critics claim that Rachel Dolezal's actions were motivated by greed and narcissism. By becoming a black person, she could more easily become an NAACP leader, chair a police watchdog committee and get a teaching appointment.Dolezal is not the only...

In regard to widespread disdain for the Middle Ages, C. S. Lewis felt that many modern people suffer from a kind of “chronological snobbery” and that “the modern conception of Progress ... is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatever.” Certainly many minds smugly assume our world’s moral superiority to that of people in the past. That assumption merits some close critical scrutiny. This claim probably does not rest on an improvement in the numbers of deaths in war and genocide. Many millions died in past atrocities such as the Mongol invasions of Asia and Europe and the Muslim...

"Pope Francis doesn't want cultural warriors; he doesn't want ideologues," said Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, Wash.: "The nuncio said the Holy Father wants bishops with pastoral sensitivity, shepherds who know the smell of the sheep." Bishop Cupich was conveying instructions the papal nuncio had delivered from Rome to guide U.S. bishops in choosing a new leader. They chose Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., who has a master's degree in social work, to succeed Archbishop Timothy Dolan whom Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times describes thus: "[A] garrulous evangelist comfortable in front of a camera, [who] led...

US diplomats seem bemused with the hierarchical structures and the lack of sophistication within the Vatican. Not only do most Catholic Church leaders lack an e-mail account, only a few "are aware of imminent decisions." A month after the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in the Sistine Chapel, on April 19, 2005, the US Embassy to the Vatican sent a cable to the State Department in Washington providing its first readings on what the United States and the world at large should expect from the new head of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI had been one...

I still hear lots of people saying that the Iraq War was stupid, not necessary and not related to Islamic fundamentalism. They also contend that President Bush was wrong to involve us in that war. The problem with the people who say this is that not only do they continue to ignore the multiple reasons for the incursion that have been discussed ad infinitum (belief Saddam had WMD, violations of the terms of Desert Storm, attempt to assassinate Bush 41, multiple violations of UN edicts, the oil-for food scandal, etc., etc.), but also that these critics have much too short...

Boomer Religion For anyone who strongly identifies with traditional Christianity, the October 6-9 series on Fox News's Hannity, with Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Moore, was rich in irony and vaguely distressing. The occasion was Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Two bright, likable, and deeply sincere married men of middle age passionately argued the positions of the liberal Democrats or progressives (Moore) and the conservative Republicans (Hannity). What generated some irony was that both celebrity worldlings revealed themselves to be regular Sunday mass-goers. They viewed their years in Catholic schools warmly and with pride, and readily associated some of...

An 18th-century portrait in the Barbados Jewish Museum shows a large, fat man sitting on a wooden chair, his merchandise spread out around him, a turban encasing his head and a beard surrounding his jaw. The inscription tells us this is a Jew, though his attire is Islamic - clothing his ancestors would have worn in Spain in the 15th century before their expulsion. The painting is no fabrication. Jews dressed like this, as we know from drawings of Maimonides, who is often depicted in a turban (though paintings of him did not appear until the 16th century). In fact,...

May 28, 2009, 0:00 a.m. The War Against ModernityAnd why Islamists are not tempted by “peace.” By Clifford D. May The war being waged against the West also is a war against modernity. For nearly a thousand years, Islam reigned supreme in much of the world. But with the coming of the modern era — generally seen as beginning in the 18th century — Christendom outpaced the Muslim world by almost every measure. Islamists believe the destruction of modernity is necessary if Islam is to regain the power to which it is entitled. “Those who know nothing of Islam...