The Fall of Rome, Revisited

  

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

I may have forgotten to cover it because in reality it was a bit of a non-event. Thomas Cole’s fanciful academic painting here shows a cataclysmic, all-consuming disaster: temples burning, mobs rioting, statues toppling, ships sinking, bodies strewn across a collapsing cityscape, which is more or less how we’ve been taught to think of it. But this is not what happened in Rome in 476. The last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was quietly deposed and sent off to retirement. There was no sack in 476, no flames, no tidal wave of chaotic destruction. Unfortunately for romantic painters, the historical reality was gradual, bureaucratic and anticlimactic.

In 476 AD, the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus1 was deposed, after reigning only about ten months, by the barbarian general Odoacer, and that’s the conventional date for the “fall” of the Western Roman Empire. But what actually fell was the last remaining shred of imperial authority in the West. In the east, emperors carried on in Constantinople for another thousand years. In the West, daily life didn’t suddenly stop, though it certainly changed. The Church remained standing and bishops and clerics stepped into civic leadership roles as senatorial power faded. Many Roman churches from this period are still in use, and had already provided shelter to the city’s population during the sack of 410 by Alaric.

What really collapsed was centralised administration and senatorial power. It hardly needs saying that Odoacer didn’t overthrow the Roman Empire at its peak of peace, power, and prosperity. By 476, the Western Empire was already a shadow of its former self; militarily overstretched, economically broken, politically fragmented and increasingly reliant on barbarian generals to do the actual ruling. (Read more.)

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The Biggest Healthcare Fraud Bust in DOJ History

 From Overton:

As the DOJ cracks down, Dr. Oz says the real change is in how they're fighting fraud: stopping the scams before the money is even gone.

He called it a paradigm shift.

“What we're doing today is changing the paradigm,” he explained.

“Not just going after bad guys and putting them behind bars, but actually getting ahead of these schemes, so the money never leaves our bank account.”

He warned that once the money is stolen, it’s practically impossible to get back.

“Because by the time we find out that these criminals have stolen and the money has left the building, it's already offshore, somewhere in some foreign country's vaults where foreign leaders are rejoicing in the fact they took advantage of the American people.”

That’s why, he said, this approach is so aggressive. (Read more.)

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Giving Your Children Balance

 From Mater et Magistra:

1. Make Play a Priority – Let your kids climb trees, play tag, or build forts. They don’t need a gymnastics class to develop coordination and strength.

2. Teach Games and Sports at Home – Kick a soccer ball in the yard, shoot hoops at the park, or teach them classic playground games like four square and hopscotch.

3. Encourage Meaningful Socialization – Playdates, church groups, neighborhood friends, and large family gatherings provide ample opportunity for social learning.

4. Develop Practical Life Skills – Teach your children to cook, garden, and build things. These experiences teach patience, problem-solving, and real-world competence.

5. Create a Culture of Learning – Read books together, explore nature, visit museums, and encourage curiosity about the world.

6. Allow Free Time – Children need unscheduled time to be creative, to daydream, and to explore their own interests.

7. Integrate Faith into Daily Life – Praying together, celebrating feast days, and serving others provide far more lasting formation than a weekly class.

Restoring the Rhythm of Family Life

Many parents feel overwhelmed, shuttling children from one activity to the next. If your family thrives in that environment, wonderful! But if you’re feeling stretched too thin, or if you simply prefer a slower pace, give yourself permission to opt out. A rich life does not require a jam-packed schedule.

The Catholic tradition gives us a beautiful model for balance—times of work, times of study, times of feasting, and times of fasting. Our children benefit from this rhythm, just as we do. A well-ordered home life is far more valuable than a dozen extracurriculars. (Read more.)

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"When a Book Can Be Read in One Day...."

Queen Henrietta Maria

Queen Henrietta Maria, Baby Charles and King Charles I

From Kate at With a Book in Our Hands:

When a book can be read in one day you know the author has to be doing something right. This was a fascinating look at members of British royalty that have not been overly explored in historical fiction as of late. Vidal humanized both Charles and Henrietta. While their relationship may or may not have evolved from “love at first sight”, their early years were largely influenced by Charles’s friend and confidante George Villiers. Charles was immature and easily swayed by others. Henrietta was a soft hearted woman who wanted to love and trust her husband to honor his promises. Henrietta also had a super power, she was a Medici. Vidal wrote with such an easy prose and didn’t allow her storytelling to get bogged down by minutiae. While I was gluttonous in my desire for more I found the editing to be spot on. It was just enough to allow for a clear precise story to flow from the page but not so much that the descriptive elements were ripped away. I’m excited that this is only book one and look forward to Vidal writing the rest of the story. All anglophiles must get this on their list ASAP! (Read more.)

The youngest daughter of Henri IV, the first Bourbon King of France, Henriette-Marie always knew she would have to marry a prince. When the Prince of Wales, Charles Stuart, travels through Paris he sees her dancing at the Louvre and within two years a marriage is arranged. However, Henriette is Catholic and Catholicism is banned in England. In preparing to become Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, Henriette has no idea of the obstacles that must be overcome before she can find happiness with Charles. The main hindrance, she soon realizes, is not the difference in religion but Charles’ best friend, George Villiers, the handsome Duke of Buckingham, who is resolved to subdue Henriette to his will. Buckingham forgets that Henriette is also half Medici and underestimates her determination to succeed as well as the depth of her love for Charles. My Queen, My Love is the first novel in the Henrietta of France Trilogy by acclaimed author Elena Maria Vidal. It describes the early years of the tumultuous marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria which preceded the English Civil Wars of the Seventeenth Century.

 

Available on Amazon

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The Intellectual Roots of Conservative Populism

 From Amuse on X:

In the history of American political thought, few figures have woven threads as enduring as William F. Buckley Jr. In Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, Sam Tanenhaus delivers a monumental work that is not only a biography but a chronicle of American conservatism's intellectual genesis. The book has rightly been heralded as exhaustive, fair, and at times unexpectedly affectionate, offering a panoramic view of a man whose influence radiates outward through Rush Limbaugh's booming radio voice, Newt Gingrich's congressional conquest, and ultimately, Donald Trump's insurgent nationalism. Let us be precise. Conservatism as we know it today, populist, nationalist, combative, media-savvy, did not spring fully formed from the head of Trump. Nor was it merely a reaction to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s or the regulatory excesses of the administrative state. It was an intellectual project first, and Buckley was its architect. What Tanenhaus accomplishes in his 1,000-page biography is the detailed excavation of this foundation. His prose is brisk and often sparkling, his research thorough and layered, and above all, his tone even-handed. For conservatives wary of a center-left biographer, the relief is considerable. This is not a hatchet job. It is a portrait in full. (Read more.)

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If Chivalry is Dead, Did Women Kill It?

 From Culturcidal:

So, before I dig any further into this, I want to note that like many Southerners, I was taught to be chivalrous from a young age – and it stuck. I open car doors and pull out chairs for women. I even walk on the side of the street closer to the road, so that if a car jumps the curb, I will be the one hit. This article discusses men giving up seats for women on the subway. Well, the last time I was on the subway in NYC (which has admittedly been quite a while because I now like to Uber while I’m there), it was crowded and I gave up my seat for a woman. In other words, I am someone who grew up with the habit of being chivalrous, and it still continues to this day.

However, it’s also worth noting that over the course of my entire life, I’ve had one girlfriend who genuinely seemed to appreciate chivalrous behavior, another that seemed to expect it and a third girl I only went on a couple of dates with, who (politely, mind you), basically said she didn’t see the point of chivalry. Beyond that, the reactions to it from women could best be described as complete indifference.

Similarly – and understandably – most men don’t care about it either, and some guys even think chivalrous men are chumps, which is a result of listening to feminist women who basically tell anyone who listens some version of, “Women can do anything men can do, except better!”

Well, if that’s true, then women should be able to get their own seats on the bus and subway without men needing to worry about how it plays out for them, right? Of course, it’s even worse than that because a lot of men believe there’s a possibility that a woman may be genuinely OFFENDED if they behave in a chivalrous way toward them. How realistic is that outside of Berkeley or some Manhattan feminist enclave? It’s hard to say, although several men in the comments section discussing this article on X talked about bad experiences they had, so that seems to be at least a somewhat realistic concern men genuinely have. (Read more.)

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Ticking Fabric and How to Use It

  

From House and Garden:

Ticking, that satisfyingly sturdy striped fabric, has a practicality and versatility that is arguably unmatched. Not only is it suitable for upholstery as well as curtains (and even clothes), but it can be chic against toiles, pretty with florals, can add interest to monochrome, blend harmoniously with other stripes, or bring balance and grounding to maximalism. Plus, it’s equally at home in a townhouse, cottage, castle or even industrial-style warehouse, where it softens the rawness of exposed brick. And it comes in a range of prices, starting at very affordable, and rising.It is the late American design legend Sister Parish who is credited with having made ticking mainstream; she used it in her own house for curtains. (Famously, Parish was Jacqueline Kennedy’s interior designer; she and Jackie spent the entire $50,000 White House redecoration budget in two weeks, on the personal quarters. Bearing in mind inflation, it makes the recent Soane-ing of Downing Street look positively parsimonious.) Before Parish, ticking was a utility fabric, used for encasing pillows and mattresses in the centuries before open coil, pocket sprung and memory foam became watchwords for comfort, when typical mattress content included straw and twigs as well as wool, horsehair and feathers (all the potential for a rather prickly bedbase!) The word ‘ticking’ derives from the Latin word tica and the Greek word theka, both meaning covering. (Read more.)

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SCOTUS ends Nationwide Injunctions?

 From The Reactionary:

For background, nationwide injunctions – “a universal remedy whereby a court enjoins a party with respect to all persons and entities, not just parties to the litigation” – have gone from a historically non-existent remedy to one which has dramatically increased in popularity over the last 25 years. The current Trump Administration has, in particular, been a victim of that judicial overreach. Seventeen nationwide injunctions were issued against the Trump Administration in the first 60 days. Trump’s first term saw 64 nationwide injunctions. To provide context, Bush, Obama, and Biden totaled 32.

Nationwide injunctions have been roundly condemned by members of the Supreme Court, and the critics are from the left and the right, from Justice Kagan to Justices Gorsuch and Thomas. But under the guidance of Chief Justice Roberts the Court failed to act. According to Justice Gorsuch, this encouraged venue gamesmanship and sowed chaos, forcing “judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions.”1

The majority opinion came from Justice Barrett, who has experienced her own recent criticisms from the Right. Today gave her a temporary reprieve. Important to the Court’s analysis was the lack of similar historic remedies and how nationwide injunctions are contrary to concepts of equity and judicial power. As Justice Barrett observed, “the universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history” and “were not a feature of federal-court litigation until sometime in the 20^th century.” In effect, relief will not be awarded to nonparties. (Read more.)

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The Great Tolkien

 From The Imaginative Conservative:

My encounter with this writer of genuine significance was unexpected. I was in the United States for the first time—my new homeland—pursuing doctoral studies in California, and I was rather perplexed: the world, the people, the customs—everything was still new and unfamiliar. I was irritated by the attitude of my fellow graduate students, whose ideological and political views and behaviors seemed wrong to me. Yet one of their favorite authors, someone they all seemed to warmly admire and know quite well, was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. I read his trilogy, enjoyed it, and found in it a strong connection to my own reading traditions and personal tastes.

I wanted to learn more about him and became even more puzzled: here was a Catholic professor in Protestant England, originally from South Africa, and a well-recognized expert in “exotic” fields—Old English language and pre-medieval literature, as well as pre-Christian Scandinavian and Irish cultures, among others. It took several years before I understood him as part of a literary movement with a clear structure, one that included highly esteemed intellectuals such as Clive Staples Lewis (a prominent literary critic and historian, prose and poetry writer, and Christian apologist), Dorothy Sayers (creator of captivating detective novels, but also a highly competent translator of Dante and author of a radio play about the life of Jesus), Charles Williams (a complex novelist with an expressionist style and a literary critic with religious undertones), and others still.

But the most difficult question remained: why were these left-leaning young people so passionate about a “dusty,” deeply traditional author like Tolkien, with his dragons, knights, and wizards? After some time, I began to understand what his admirers saw in Tolkien, and from that moment on, I began to understand the author himself much better. These young radicals and progressives, as they were, still had a thirst for spirituality and imagination. They were searching for alternative roots—different from the utilitarian and contractual world in which they had grown up. They sensed these roots, even vaguely or confusedly, in Tolkien’s writings. It was, in fact, a compensation for the romanticism they lacked.

Very well—but in that case, Tolkien was deeper and more complex than I had initially thought. Beneath the colorful surface, there were layers that only gradually reveal themselves to a thoughtful reader. First, there is the mythological layer: a reinvention of mythology, we might say, because this scholarly author didn’t merely reuse the legends of the distant North—he rewrote them in a spectacular and often extremely intricate way. Then comes the allegorical level, which carried significant political implications. Tolkien’s thinking descends from the “distributist” movement that flourished in England between 1910 and 1930, theorized especially by Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. This brief political movement opposed both socialism (meaning state and central control over the economy and politics) and large-scale capitalism (which implied vast differences in class, wealth, power, and influence). (Read more.)

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