The Narthex

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,…

Being conservative has very little to do with the political left or the political right. We at the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies are not right-wingers. Though some of our views might be characterized as right-wing, we hold many opinions that would commonly be regarded as more typical of…

Hope and optimism are often confused. An American wit, whose name I can’t recall, once defined a pessimist as “an optimist with the facts.” I must admit I love that kind of pithy, cynical humor that Americans do so well. Such cracks work well because there’s at least a grain…

Today, crazy notions spread like wild fire and become wilder as they spread, often claiming the authority of science, and using the muscle of popular mass culture to cower most people into acquiescence, if not belief. We are indeed in the midst of a pandemic, but it’s much bigger than…

From time to time we need to take stock. The history of mankind has not a smooth progression, but more like a series of steps, sometimes short, sometimes long, separated by risers that may be shallow or dramatically steep. Looking backwards, we took many steps that now seem with hindsight…

The early Church fathers were a tough and uncompromising lot. They had to be. Sharp-tongued St. Jerome wouldn’t have done well in the diplomatic service, or even made it past the interview; he bitterly attacked heretical enemies and wasn’t always very nice to his friends. St. Ignatius of Antioch was…

Catholics and other Christians have had enormous influence on the life of the mind and the creative arts of poetry, art, and music. Poetry has always been a strong ally of our Faith and our civilization. The tricky thing, though, is that it’s hard to define; not everything that rhymes…

The Australian Curriculum, Reporting and Assessment Authority (ACARA) issued a Consultation Curriculum for History Years 7-10 early this year. The 84-page document is described as “consultation material only” – which is to say that it has not yet been endorsed by the various state and federal education ministers. Nevertheless, the thrust of the document is clearly…

Guardian journalist Van Badham has defined Western civilization in purely negative and derogatory terms: “a racist colonial project to crush, change, enslave, eradicate or genocidally erase other cultures.” It is difficult to regard a person who could write such a thing as quite sane. Christopher Dawson insisted that the Christian…

The goal of Australia’s Dawson Centre, of which I am director, is not evangelization: that is a task for others to undertake. Our role is to revive and justify the Christian intellectual tradition, to argue for the essentially rational nature of belief based squarely upon Faith and Reason. Faith is not at…

With apologies for being prescriptive, I recommend that you watch the two-part documentary on the Hitler Youth movement, Hitler-Jugend. Its impact is terrifying, and it uses color footage that most of us have never seen before. But the important thing is that it demonstrates unforgettably the power and the naivety…

On February 9th Australia’s SBS TV News ran a short segment that purported to allay some people’s concerns about the COVID vaccine.  I cannot find a recording of the broadcast, but an SBS News article called "The most common myths about the coronavirus vaccine - and why they aren’t true"…

On average nearly 150,000 people die throughout the world every single day, from all causes, amounting to a total of more than 55 million each year. Those totals should be constantly in our minds as a sort of yardstick or backdrop to our consideration of the numbers reported slain by…

When you strive to defend the achievements of Christian civilization you encounter an awful lot of kickback, a lot of angry hostility towards Christian culture. It can be dispiriting. But Christmas is a time for absolute and entirely positive joyfulness. It is not the chief Christian festival, for that honor is reserved to Easter, the…