February 6, 2011
By Barry Bercier, A.A.

When Cain builds man’s first city, designed to protect the first murderer from those who would come after him, God provides one of its laws, the law of sevenfold vengeance.  The family of any murderer is to suffer seven times as many deaths in punishment of the original crime.  Cain’s city then is a remedy, assented to by God, for the evil and violence of men, but not given God’s blessing!  It is governed by evil and violent men who restrain each other in their evil doing only by terrifying them with greater evils still.



January 22, 2011
By Barry Bercier, A.A.

Faced with the nihilism, disorder and totalitarianism that seem the destination of Enlightenment progress, we can find ourselves longing, naturally enough, for a return to that from which the progress first started out. If for philosophic types like Leo Strauss “return” meant return to pre-Christian Greek philosophy, for Catholics there can be a strong desire to return to something like the order of Christendom. Even while willing to acknowledge the failings and extremes of that earlier time, still there was something so good, true and beautiful about it, something in its own way so entirely without parallel in the human story, that we can’t but be roused, some of us, to a sort of powerful spiritual nostalgia.

January 3, 2011

The title for this entry is stolen from the title of an article written by one of the great conservative thinkers of the 20th century, a real aristocrat of the mind if ever there was one, Leo Strauss.  Strauss was a witness to the monstrous unreason that shattered the old order of things in Europe and beyond, and spent his life in the effort to understand how it came to be.  Given the catastrophic consequences of that unreason, the consequences of which had not played themselves out in his lifetime (and have not played themselves out in ours), he went in search of a reasonable response and, if at all possible, a remedy to which such a response might lead.

December 30, 2010.

At about the time the young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville was traveling horseback around the United States to study the character of the American Revolution, another young French aristocrat was getting ordained to the priesthood. He was Emmanuel d’Alzon, the founder of the Assumptionists. His family had experienced the terrific upheaval that was the French Revolution, and the new priest was to live out the rest of his life dealing with its consequences for the Church.