Daniel

“I once angered a number of students at the university where I taught by suggesting that “multiculturalism” is a sham. There is nothing “multi” about its uniform politics, I said, and it is too rootless and shallow to be a culture. When I met with some of them, I showed them Millet’s Angelus. They grew uneasy. They did not want to concede that we were looking at what was essentially cultural. That was because they knew in their hearts that what I said about contemporary man is true: he has no home. One of them complained that I was imposing my view of culture upon them, but he had no reply when I said that my description fits every known culture until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“[H]owever dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. It is true that ever since the French Revolution attempts have been repeatedly made to manufacture feast days and holidays that have no connection with divine worship, or are sometimes even opposed to it: “Brutus days,” or even that hybrid, “Labor Day.” In point of fact the stress and strain of giving them some kind of festal appearance is one of the very best proofs of the significance of divine worship for a feast; and nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“What James Hilton wants is a monastery without monks, the good of prayer without prayer, contemplation without a God to contemplate, and, as Flannery O’Connor will put it in her uncompromising way, the Church of Christ Without Christ. It cannot be. A blandly warm affection for the good things of the past is no match for the modern progressive’s ferocious drive to obliterate them or for the “evolutionary” social theories that prey upon man like monsters of the deep.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World