We should all attend …

… 'The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis' Review | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For all the grandeur and ambition of their writings, the Christian humanists of the Forties were little more noticeably influential than those of our day. They depended on an audience of sympathetic fellow travelers to work out and give a first hearing to their ideas no less than do their counterparts in the present. With their constant summonses to contemplation, prayer, earnest faith, and ascetical sanctity, they clearly recognized something that Jacobs’s essay of two years ago failed to register, but that Auden appreciated from the moment he wrote his great poem “September 1, 1939,” in which he spoke of those who are good and loving as “ironic points of light” in the vast darkness. Intellectual influence is a communication of spirit with spirit, and of the soul with eternity. It acts within the interior privacy of each person and, should it come to have any measurable consequences for public life, it will be through a welling up from hidden springs impossible to measure.