Category: Essay

[article] A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature

ABSTRACT: This essay offers an extended, reasoned walk-through Nathan Lyons’ path-breaking text, Signs in the Dust.  Every so often, a book comes about that manages to show how a variety of philosophical paths, hitherto regarded as separate, are converging on a common terrain.  The value of such texts is to name this common terrain, and to go beyond mere juxtaposition of different philosophical trajectories, actually to disclose the deeper affinity that makes them belong together in a coherent whole.  This is what this book manages to accomplish: by showing the rich tapestry of inquiries converging around the nature/culture relationship, it successfully retrieves the medieval conversation on natural culture and cultural nature.… Read More [article] A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature

Editorial Team

[essay] The Constitution of Culture

The truth of the common good, as what we rightly ought to seek in our cultural realities and, therefore, as the final cause of any political constitution, does not alone suffice to cause that cultural reality’s alignment.  We must instead recognize a more complex causal constitution.  It is just this causality that was acknowledged—though not well-enough explained—by Jacques Maritain in his Integral Humanism, and it is just this causality which we will take up to explain in this essay.… Read More [essay] The Constitution of Culture

Brian Kemple

[essay] Civic Life and Home

To speak of the Christian roots of Europe, or the Puritan founding of America, should be approached with great prudence and a deep caution. The temptation that needs to be explicitly alluded to is that pertaining to a sort of “re-enchanted” nationalism. The City of God is not an attempt to undermine the need for the embodied realities of home and political life. Rather, the nuance or caveat is to say that the City of God offered by Christ as witnessed in…… Read More [essay] Civic Life and Home

Editorial Team

[review] Integralism

Catholic integralism, generally speaking, comprises a return to the past in order to move beyond the modern problem. In effect, its answer is to discard the political developments of modernity wholesale and return pick up where the Middle Ages left off. To many who do not hold this view, and who are not as familiar with the Integralist movement, such a suggestion appears strange to the point that this characterization may seem to be an uncharitable. To the contrary, however, it appears to us that the integralists themselves characterize the spirit of their philosophy in the same manner.… Read More [review] Integralism

Francisco Eduardo Plaza1 Comment

[review] Nihilism & Technology | Nihilism

Where, and how, do we bring meaning into the living of our lives? A movement from our assumed passive nihilism to a conscious active nihilism, Nolen Gertz argues. Despite this self-actualizing attempt at nihilism, it remains now as always a deleterious belief for any human being to adopt—the active no less, and perhaps quite a great deal more, than the passive.… Read More [review] Nihilism & Technology | Nihilism

Brian Kemple

[essay] The Conflict between Human Dignity and Abortion – Part II

Francisco Plaza, PhDCathedral High School, Houston TXEditor, Reality In the encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope Saint John Paul II listed several crimes against human dignity, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, all of which are “opposed to life itself.”[1] Apart from harming the victims themselves, these are also understood to do violence against society… Read More [essay] The Conflict between Human Dignity and Abortion – Part II

Francisco Eduardo Plaza1 Comment