“Nothing can be clearer than that we require a story to explain to ourselves why we are here and what our future is to be, and many other things, including where authority resides.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

“Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable – is almost horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Nicholas Nickleby”, in Appreciations and Criticisms of Charles Dickens, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2007)

“Odd comparison: ‘Believing in God is like believing in Zeus.’ They aren’t even ‘gods’ in the same sense of the term. Zeus was a contingent being which something else caused to exist. God is the necessary being who causes all else to exist.”

J. Budziszewski in "Underground Thomist" email Feb. 25, 2019

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.

“When the knight came upon the dragon, did he estimate whether the dragon could be overcome in his lifetime? No. He stood up and fought.”

J. Budziszewski in “Underground Thomist” email Feb. 25, 2019

“The future is, of course, an illusion. Nothing has happened there yet.... Among Marshall McLuhan’s many intriguing metaphors, the most paradoxical one is his reference to ‘rearview mirror’ thinking. All of us, he said, are speeding along a highway with our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror… He believed that only a few avantgarde artists (and, of course, himself) were capable of looking through the windshield so that they might tell us where we are going. The irony here is that the windshield is also a rearview mirror of sorts, for whatever future we see is only – can only be – a projection of the past.... Imagined futures are always more about where we have been than where we are going.”

Start of author’s “Introduction” to Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century