In this paper I argue one cannot be a Christian and libertarian with any pretense of consistency. The argument comes in three major parts: the theological, the logical and the historical. The theological argument identifies and examines the significance of the concept of transcendence underlying three major social encyclicals that deal with economic matters, Rerum [...]
English families sometimes play ‘the Belgium Game’ as they motor through that country toward holidays in France or Switzerland; it gives them almost three hours to recall the name of a single famous Belgian. Not all contestants succeed. The surrealist painter Rene Magritte (1898-1967) is one acceptable answer, and I recently visited his museum [...]
Since 1991, a new conception of Indian-white relations, known as the “middle ground,” has slowly emerged in Indian and western American historiography, challenging the old and New Western History and Indian history paradigms. The relations between Native Americans and white settlers—the middle ground—served as a gigantic trade zone in which culture became the economic goods [...]
The massacre at a cinema in Colorado where audiences were enjoying The Dark Knight Rises—the culmination of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie trilogy—seems to have provoked only a feeble discussion of gun control that is going nowhere, and very little on the showing of extreme violence in movies. The contrast with an earlier superhero film [...]
Anyone harboring concerns over the state of British culture should have had their fears laid to rest by the London Olympics’ opening ceremonies. British culture is well and truly dead. From the “signing” choir that could hardly sing, to the parade of “notable” left-wing figures carrying the flag around the stadium, the mish-mash of bad [...]
This address was delivered at the 2008 Annual Founders’ Day Breakfast of the Free Enterprise Institute. Josiah Bunting, III became president of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in 2004. He had previously served as superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute. From 1966 until 1972 he served on active duty in the Regular Army, attaining the rank of Major. [...]
Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, has long been a popular figure for political conservatives to cite. But his views on religion get relatively little attention. This is a shame, because Burke has a lot to offer those concerned about matters of religion, morality, and politics in contemporary American life. He is a figure who [...]
The deer lowered its head to lap up some of the icy cool water of the stream. It was a young buck that had not yet grown its antlers, and it stood about two and a half feet at the shoulder. It had just woken up, and was breaking its fast with the frost-stiffened grass [...]
It’s staple fare in opinion pages and textbooks these days that “inequality” has been on the rise in this country over the past generation. President Obama’s economic policy, for what it’s worth, has been based on this premise. The introduction to Obama’s first budget, back in 2009, went on at length: […]
The topic “Politics and the Imagination” is at once larger and more restricted than “Politics and the Arts,” the theme of this Tocqueville Forum. It is more restricted because I mean to exclude the practical problem of the relation between the arts and public life. Indeed, by politics I mean here not the working processes [...]
San Bernardino, Calif., has now followed Stockton into bankruptcy. Harrisburg and Scranton, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala., home to Birmingham, are already there to welcome them. Detroit has been taken into receivership by Michigan. A plan under discussion is to level a fourth of the city and reconvert it into the pasture and farmland it [...]
Albert Jay Nock, an excellent but largely forgotten writer, once wrote a little book titled Our Enemy, the State. I still reread it when I’m groggy from absorption in the daily events of politics. It revives me like a slap in the face. If I were a pagan, I might fancy I heard the Olympian laughter [...]
Among the many conversations I have had with Great Books students over the years, none is more lively than when we discuss various theories of truth. It seems to always come up when we are reading and talking about Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. In order to make immediate connection with them, I tell the story about [...]
In the American tradition, the idea of secession—or, more politely and with less emotional and tainted baggage, disunion—runs very deep. If the soul was once the Constitution, America’s body is nearly corrupt beyond redemption, would it not be best to find a healthy body for the soul to thrive? I think those of us who [...]