Category: Essay

[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

[essay] The Roots of Human Dignity & its Modern Dissolution – Part I

Francisco Plaza, PhDCathedral High School, Houston TXEditor, Reality As modern secularism strives to move further away from any sense of the religious, any principle which even suggests a possible theological basis rapidly comes under fire, even at the cost of human flourishing itself. Human dignity, an idea with Christian roots that has since been largely… Read More [essay] The Roots of Human Dignity & its Modern Dissolution – Part I

Francisco Eduardo Plaza1 Comment

[review] What Love Is

“Romantic love”, Carrie Jenkins writes near the end of her book, “cannot continue to be something we just stumble into and accept.”  This is true and good advice, and Jenkins’ book—which spans a prologue, introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion—successfully instigates a questioning after the truth of what romantic love is or ought to be.  The implication, however, that there might be other things—our politics, our careers, our religious beliefs—into which we, having stumbled into them, can or ought to accept unquestioningly, is itself highly questionable.  Indeed, I will argue that many of the presuppositions on which Jenkins builds the argument of What Love Is appear accepted without question.  As we intend to show here, these unexamined presuppositions, when exposed, result in Jenkins’ argument falling apart—or, perhaps to continue the metaphor, turn a stumble into a precipitous fall.… Read More [review] What Love Is

Brian Kemple

[essay] Aristotle on Nature (φύσις) – Part II

Part 2 of 2: The Ancient meaning of nature, that of an ἀρχή, is a necessary beginning. A necessary beginning for what? For katharsis of the lived nihilism of modernity! As we explain in our editorial introduction to the first Issue of Reality the English term catharsis, meaning “a release, or relief from powerful repressed emotions,” is from the ancient Greek term κᾰθαρσις (katharsis).… Read More [essay] Aristotle on Nature (φύσις) – Part II

Daniel C. Wagner1 Comment