When the American Civil War ended with the surrender of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, scarcely any American, north or south, could estimate how much the country had changed from the peaceful and prosperous nation of thirty-one million souls to a nation burdened with debt, with the south in
In my last post (Onward Progress), I had intended to give an account of the history of progress from its origins in Medieval Europe, especially in England and France, down to today’s twenty-first century political and social movement defined as progressivism. Since to be “progressive” means so many things to
Anyone who is so “progressive” as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God; whoever remains in the teaching has the Father and the Son. (2 John 1:9) ORIGIN OF PROGRESS At first glance, Biblical text would be the last place to find mention of the
“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.” –Abraham Lincoln Where does one begin? To say that I am at a loss for words would be an understatement. Episodes as this have been echoed
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway CIVILIZATION IN HISTORY Civilization, as a salient topic of the Zeitgeist, came to the fore with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This was considered by many as the end of history
Both the informed Christian and the secular educated seem to have forgotten everything about Gabriel Marcel (1887 – 1973). Throughout the twentieth century, Marcel has served as a symbol of France’s greatness as a dramatist, musician, and philosopher. He seminally contributed to the emergence and growth of twentieth century existentialism,
The concept of human rights, if not centered on some grounding principle, is a mere patchwork of inharmonious preferences that incoherently tribalizes people into a Babel* of mutual incomprehensibility. The defense of human rights needs a foundation of some substantial bedrock standard other than feeling or believing that some rights,
With the world becoming increasingly divided into civilizational ‘large spaces’, (the BRICS* group); sovereign states ‘going it alone’, (e.g., Hungary, the United States); and long-established alliances breaking up under the weight of heavy-handed globalism, (e.g., the European Union [EU], the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]), the new buzzword of the
From my previous post on the American Revolution, I covered the nature of revolution itself. I treated this topic as consisting of two forms: first, a background of historical events that move in a lineage from a common ancestral ‘cell’ leading inexorably toward revolution, in which I discuss the nature
As a blog devoted primarily to culture, I view culture as the moral repository from which all politics and economics are derived. But culture, in itself, cannot be understood without accounting for the historical situation that develops and produces the arts, philosophies, and values that constitute a civilization. This includes
