C.S. Lewis: How ‘Medieval’ Was He?

When it comes to evaluating C.S. Lewis’ engagement with medieval authors, Jason Baxter performs the heavy lifting with ease, almost with wings. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind comprises, in effect, a sequence of primers on major and minor figures—Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Calcidius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, Bernard Sylvestris, inter alios—while it traces their imprint on Lewis’ writings. Continue Reading...

Art as Spiritual Journey

In his essay “The Philosophy of Medieval Art,” Bishop Fulton Sheen opens with the statement, “There is no such thing as understanding the art in any period apart from the philosophy of that period.” Continue Reading...

Understanding Pinochet

Writing a biography of someone like General Augusto Pinochet is fraught with potential pitfalls. Does it become an exercise in whitewashing someone whose regime oversaw a brutal repression which included the “disappearing” of approximately 2,228 people? Continue Reading...

Markets, populism and a fading American dream

The political divisions that started erupting across America in 2015 are about many things. These include the meaning of national sovereignty, the sense of a growing chasm between the political class and everyone else, and angst about what many believe to be unwarranted accelerations in wealth and income inequalities. Continue Reading...

Three books to help you think like an economist

Everyone knows that there is a difference between knowing about something and knowing how to do something. The first is a superficial way of knowing, not a bad way to begin, but it is no substitute for the mastery which comes by integrating knowledge into experience. Continue Reading...

Turning points in Catholic social teaching

In a recent Acton Line podcast I began by asking Father Robert Sirico the very large question, what is Catholic social teaching and why is it important today? He answered that the Church has always had a social teaching but that when we usually discuss Catholic social teaching today we begin with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. Continue Reading...
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