The St. Austin Review
The St. Austin Review (StAR) is an international journal of Catholic culture, literature, and ideas. In its pages, printed every two months, some of the brightest and most vigorous minds around meet to explore the people, ideas, movements, and events that shape and misshape our world.
Europe and the Culture of Christendom
Sample Article The Desert’s Ancient Peace: Christendom from Homer to Eliot
The Desert’s Ancient Peace: Christendom from Homer to Eliot
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water
only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the
pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
There is an ancient human longing, as deep as time itself, as deep as every mortal heart, for the good that men call peace. This longing has roots as deep as the mystery of the cherubim and the flaming sword preventing man’s return to the primordial Garden from which he was exiled after the Fall. In modern times peace has sometimes gotten a bad name, where peacenik rhymes with beatnik, tokens of The Purple Decades of the 1960s and ‘70s, often marked by anti-war movements of hippies holding up two fingers in a V sign which paradoxically also represents victory in war. They certainly had it right that war is the opposite of peace, and War and Peace is Tolstoy’s title for his greatest novel built upon a dichotomy as ancient as Good and Evil. But is all war evil, and is all peace good? The ancient Greek philosophers understood that the answer to any question must begin with the definitions of the terms involved. For what is war after all, and what is peace?
The Ink Desk Blog
November-December issue: Europe and the Culture of Christendom
Sample Content from Our Latest Issue Table of Contents Sample [...]
September-October issue: Feminine Faith and Fortitude
Sample Content from Our Latest Issue Table of Contents Sample [...]
Wraiths and Reason
Do things that go bump in the night have [...]
Should We Give Thanks for Technology?
A controversial discussion for Thanksgiving... Should We Give Thanks for [...]
New and Exclusive from Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce offers a sneak preview of what's newly posted [...]
St. Austin Review Issues
More From The Ink Desk Blog
The Democracy of the Dead
What does G. K. Chesterton describe as being the democracy of the dead and why? The Democracy of the Dead - Joseph Pearce
The Christ-Haunted Holiness of Flannery O’Connor
Finding beauty, sanity and sanctity in the ugliness of suffering with Flannery O'Connor... The Sanity and Suffering of Flannery O'Connor - Joseph Pearce
Shakespeare and the Historian
In 1949, Duff Cooper published Sergeant Shakespeare, about the so-called lost years of William Shakespeare. From 1585 to 1592, there is a gap in the record of Shakespeare’s life, and much speculation has gone into [...]
Four False Roads to Happiness and the Free Peoples of Middle Earth
I feel compelled to beg your pardon as you enter into this post, like a Hobbit unprepared to feed a troupe of dwarves that have just come upon him unannounced, that this post will not [...]
Portrait of a Noble Jesuit
Paying tribute to the indomitable Father Joseph Fessio... Portrait of a Noble Jesuit - Joseph Pearce
Two New Online Shakespeare Courses
Joseph Pearce is teaching online courses on Antony & Cleopatra and King Lear in the New Year. Here are the details: Two New Online Shakespeare Courses - Joseph Pearce