Our Hero Socrates
February 1, 2010
Peter Augustine Lawler
It’s my pleasure to be able to introduce Nalin Ranasinghe’s Socrates and the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias to you as one of the most able, eloquent, noble, profound, and loving books ever written on Socrates. Ranasinghe restores for us the example of a moral hero who inaugurated a moral revolution in opposition to his country’s post-imperial cynicism and nihilism. What Socrates discovered about the human soul remains true for us in our similarly cynical and nihilistic time. Here’s the truth:
The Hook of Truth
January 26, 2010
Gerard Kreijen
A review of Edmund Campion: A Life by Evelyn Waugh (Ignatius Press, 2005 [First published by Longmans, 1935])
That the undisputed master of dark humor and satire should have produced what is arguably the most compelling short biography of a saint to date is perhaps even more extraordinary than the claim that, today, both the biography and its author deserve close attention. Indeed, few means serve better to confront the hollow relativism of our age than turning to the conversion of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and the life of Edmund Campion (1540-1581), the saintly subject of his 1935 book.
