In my latest Loonie Politics column I say a crisis is no time to suspend our habit of questioning authority including in the political arena.

“all men naturally love freedom and hate servitude…”

Julius Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul

In Convivium I say the movie 1917 could have gone wrong in so many ways. Instead it surprised me by going very right in many ways, from avoiding cheap clichés about the Great War to a positive depiction of masculinity. Go see it if you haven’t.

“I refer to those who have fallen under the devilish spell of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism,’ and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called ‘deconstructionism.’… in this way of understanding things, language is under deep suspicion and is even thought to be delusional. Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains, at long last, the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in World War II: They didn’t believe it was real.) In an earlier time, the idea that language is incapable of mapping reality would have been considered nonsense, if not a form of mental illness. In fact, it is a form of mental illness. Nonetheless, in our own time the ideas has become an organizing principle of prestigious academic departments. You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

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.