Let's Explore What Others Ignore
Resurrection, published in 1899, was Tolstoy’s last novel and the cause of his being excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s powerful and depressing and thought-provoking in the extreme. Resurrection fully embodies Tolstoy’s method of writing after his religious awakening;…
One cannot read Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education without feeling a tremendous sense of loss – the loss of purpose, the loss of a full life, the loss of the future. I’ll quote Dawson at length here, because…
The Hound of Distributism, A Solution for Our Social and Economic Crisis, Edited by Richard Aleman. I picked up this gem at the 2023 Chesterton Conference in Minneapolis. If you want to quickly and (relatively) easily get the gist of…
“For the new paganism has nothing in common with the poetical idealization of Hellenic myth by the humanists and classicists of recent centuries: it is the unloosing of the powers of the abyss — the dark forces that have been…
With God in America, The Spiritual Legacy of an Unlikely Jesuit, Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., Compiled and edited by John M. DeJak and Marc Lindeijer, S.J. When Fr. Walter Ciszek came back to the United States after 23 years captivity…
Empire of Ice and Stone, The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, by Buddy Levy. It’s a very suspenseful, rather complicated Arctic exploration story that all started in 1913. The author’s angle on the adventure is a tale of…
In 1939, an American Jesuit priest, Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, slipped into the Soviet Union in hopes of ministering to Catholics who had been deprived of their priests by the communist government. In short order he was arrested, mercilessly interrogated…
Amundsen. Shackleton. Peary. Nansen. The pantheon of Arctic exploration is full of legends, but one you probably never heard of who belongs there is Valerian Albanov. Although a big fan of Arctic exploration books, I had never heard of Albanov…
With God in Russia, by Walter J. Ciszek, SJ, with Daniel L. Flaherty, SJ. In 1939, an American Jesuit priest named Walter J. Ciszek (born in 1904) slipped into the Soviet Union using a false identity, in the hope of…
Few things in this world are more culturally unpopular than abstaining from alcohol. Just about everywhere on earth people are conditioned to associate alcoholic beverages with fun, and even to believe it’s impossible to have fun without alcohol. And this…
The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, originally published in 2010, with an updated afterword (2020). “Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the…
Holy Moments, A Handbook for the Rest of Your Life, by Matthew Kelly. It’s a little book with a big idea. And it looks like you can buy six copies for FREE. The idea is to fill your life with…
When you think about “unpopular culture” in the context of this blog, you probably think about “high culture.” Maybe so, but today we’re going low. Bruce Campbell explains what his autobiography is all about on the back cover: “… Bookstores…
After writing my short review of an 18-year-old ER episode I couldn’t forget, I started thinking about books I’ve read over the years that similarly stuck in my mind. I came up with 33 of them. This is by no…
In the Arena, An Autobiography, by Charlton Heston, is not my normal read. It sparked my interest because three of Heston’s films, The Ten Commandments, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, are among my favorites and I was curious about…
Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G.K. Chesterton on the Only State That Creates And Loves Its Own Citizens Public schools Two-income families Birth Control Abortion Divorce These cultural institutions are so commonplace that, with the exception of abortion,…
Tolstoy’s last major work was A Calendar of Wisdom, Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul. He wrote many of the sayings, and included or adapted those of many others. Often cited names include Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Confucius, Emerson, Goethe, Kant,…
Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction book The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a forceful argument for non-violent resistance — and against organized religion, governments, and the entirety of pagan civilization under which we have lived for thousands of years. Throw Christianity and…
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? Translated by Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky What Is Art? Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) spent 15 years mulling over the question before finally publishing his profound essay of that title in 1897. Today’s readers may find many of…
Longitude, first published in 1995, is a best-selling, award-winning book about how Europeans figured out how to determine longitude at sea during the 18th and early 19th centuries. As early as the time of Columbus, Europeans relied heavily on sea…