I know, I know--I still owe one more post on Burke eviscerating fantasist utopian "justice" lunatics. I'm saving up my energy for that one. In the meantime, I've also been reading William Hazlitt's wonderful sketch of Burke in Political Essays, with Sketches of Public...

This one’s for the John Wayne fans. Our poem for today’s edition of “Melanchthon Mondays” is on a similar theme to last week’s, but this time no particular poet is named.  Once again, the poem is in elegiac couplets, and once again I’ve tried to imitate them in...

The grave of John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome famously reads, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." While doing some prep for a class this fall, I chanced to read Catullus 70 and was reminded of Keats's grave: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere...

Last time, we saw Edmund Burke's claim that it was unjust to punish a man for a name to which he happens to be attached, or, rather, which happens to be attached to him. "It is not very just," he says, to exact vengeance on a person because of his natural ancestors;...

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here is Edmund Burke on the injustice of punishing men for the crimes of their predecessors. Burke, as a Christian thinker, knew that to do so was a product of the rationalism (which is, for that reason, irrational) of an "enlightened...

“Melanchthon Mondays” continues! I had a lot of fun reading and working on this one. This week’s poem is about Homer and poetic inspiration. Christians, I think it’s fair to say, are used to thinking of inspiration only in narrow terms: the Holy Spirit’s direct...

First Things recently ran my metrical translation of Philip Melanchthon's poem on the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth. You can read an accompanying essay at Mere Orthodoxy. Here is another: a version of Psalm 111. First, the Psalm in the English of the King James:...

I'll have more to say about my intentions for this blog later on. But for my first post I want to direct your attention to an essay called "Ver Erat Aeternum" that I wrote for Ad Fontes this past winter on Christians as people most at home in the season of spring. For...