The Narthex

Edmund Burke described society as “a partnership... between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Conservatives feel this keenly, believing they have obligations to generations past and to come. Enemies of conservatism, often driven by deep resentment of traditional values, prefer to…

Last summer I reviewed an important book about the eugenics movement of 100 years ago, and the subject bears repeating. The book is Mark H. Sutherland's Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it. A link…

Anybody who writes the odd opinion piece, whether spurred on by momentary outrage at some public or private folly, or just obligated to do so in going about his lawful occasions, runs dry from time to time. Or rather wonders whether there is any point in expressing views at all,…

It is a remarkable thing that the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem are held in trust by a Muslim, Adeeb Joudeh al-Husseini, who is a member of a family that has honorably maintained the holy places there for centuries. Christians and Muslims have had a…

We at the Christopher Dawson Centre, in Australia, are looking forward to hosting a talk by Prof. Ian Plimer on Thursday April 21. He is a controversial and provocative climate scientist who questions the prevailing "narrative." After choosing the venue, a pub in central Hobart, and making the arrangements I…

Hypocrisy is the offence that Christians are most often charged with. It is a powerful and effective cudgel to beat them over the head because it appears to be self-evidently true: everyone can give you examples of Christians behaving badly, now and throughout history. The charge is immediately persuasive to…

In the last scene of one of Shakespeare’s grimmest tragedies, King Lear, by now an old and broken man, weeps for his dead daughter Cordelia:

No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou'lt come…

As we enter the third year of pandemic-driven fear, we need to take stock of the whole range of its consequences: deaths and hospitalizations certainly, but also lives broken by business failures, the cruelty of forcing isolation on dying people, abuse of authority, absurd and scientifically unfounded regulations, the craven…

Tennis Australia celebrated January 24th this year as Gay Pride Day. Australia has changed a lot in the past couple of generations; few now challenge the freedom of LBGT people to celebrate their diversity, and many warmly applaud them and defend their right to do so. But the official sponsor…

“The Liberal Arts” is a term we hear a lot which perhaps calls for some explanation. We are not talking about precious and “arty” school subjects that students do when they can’t quite manage math and science! Though that is a common enough impression: I recall as classics master in…

I recently returned from a visit to Perth. Western Australia and Tasmania are COVID-free “bubbles” and one is able to travel fairly freely between them (freely, that is to say, if you except the necessity of obtaining what amounts to a visa to pass from one state of the Commonwealth…

To my mind the greatest challenge of human education is the building and maintaining of historical awareness. How can we have even an inkling of where we stand and where we’re heading if our grasp of the past is feeble or non-existent? Human memory is so short, and deliberate bias…

I have now had both vaccine doses; I’m neither an “anti-vaxxer” nor a conspiracy theorist. But I have good, intelligent, well-informed, and rational friends who strongly oppose the vaccine, and I do not like to see them punished by the infliction of civil disabilities or verbal abuse. Some Christians and…

Few today may remember the American actor and comedian George Burns. He died in 1996, at the age of exactly 100, a venerable doyen of the Vaudeville era. Never on stage without his signature cigar, he delighted generations with his arched eyebrow, gravelly voice, and pessimistic Jewish humor. My favorite…

The phrase civil disobedience stirs up a whole range of reactions. We might think of Gandhi’s brave followers beaten to the ground in their serried ranks as they tried to break the salt monopoly, or Martin Luther King’s peace marchers, or of WWII resistance fighters in Greece, France, and Italy,…