Last Christmas Eve, my family, like many American families, watched Miracle on 34th Street. I don’t think I had ever seen the original; most of our kids had not seen any version. We thoroughly enjoyed it. I was impressed with Natalie Wood’s performance—a 7 year old actress playing a 7 year old very well. I [...]
St. Rose of Lima One of my fondest memories—precious, to use the word properly—is of my great aunt Lonnie taking me to one of the oldest churches in Great Bend, Kansas. I was probably three or four, and we were alone in the church, early in the morning. I can’t remember exactly why [...]
Plenty of Christmas gifts have been suggested by our imaginative contributors for imaginative conservatives; some affordable, some posh, but always appropriate. But what do we give to our Leftist friends, assuming that we have any? One should not suggest anything that mocks their obvious deficiencies, even if those are self-induced; after all, Christmas gifts ought [...]
What does it mean to teach in an age of ideology? At first glance, especially for conservatives, the answer appears to be obvious: to advocate for conservative ideas and principles against the prevailing ideologies of relativism, feminism, multiculturalism, and other “politically correct” dogmas that dominate the institutions of American higher education today. Alternatively, if you [...]
Political Philosophy: A Historical Introduction by Michael J. White […]
Have we, as a culture, lost our ability to appreciate satire? Like Socratic questioning, satire can help us “recollect” the timeless truths that we apparently have always known, but just forgotten for awhile. The question occurred to me recently as I was reading Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, picked up on a Thanksgiving trip to Colonial [...]
The notion of the president as comforter-in-chief fits snugly with the notion of political “solutions”—e.g., gun control—to essentially moral and theological problems—e.g., schoolhouse massacres. In a well-meant message of consolation, delivered Sunday at Newtown, President Obama declared that “These tragedies must end. And to end them we must change.” He again used the word “change,” [...]
Christmas is all about grace and redemption. It’s also about the strange and wonderful person who wanders the world in the hope (conscious or unconscious) about grace. It’s also, of course, about the personal, loving, and creative God who became man and wandered among us for a while. What’s more wonderful than that? My Christmas [...]
In Aristotle's view, “true wealth” was finite, restricted to those articles “useful to the association of the polis or the household,” and thus necessary to sustain “the good life.” The exchange of commodities for money with the aim of making a profit was an artificial, and potentially destructive, enterprise. Trade, Aristotle declared, should be mutually beneficial, [...]
The world is supposed to end this Friday (or possibly on Sunday, or not any time soon) coinciding with the expiration of the Mayan “Long Count” calendar, which at 5,125 years-old survived considerably longer than did the Mayan civilisation. (Don’t smirk: your local Wal-Mart sells processed cheese slices that may outlast Western Civilisation by a [...]
Eric Christiansen in The Spectator had some interesting things to say in a review of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (and why it still matters) by Philip Hensher. Enjoy "...something can be done to prepare children for writing beforehand. For example, if you live near a common, poultry market or farm, get them to collect goose feathers. [...]
One of the sadder aspects of Christmas time in America is the display of ignorance on the part of so many Americans regarding the constitutional tradition of our country. Why at Christmas? Because it is at this time of year that we hear the whining call of “that song” or “that play” or “that display” [...]
I was driving into our church parking lot the other day, thinking about a nice essay by Douglas Minson on the 79th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. I’m sure glad it happened about seven years before I was born. Anyway, it occurred to me that I had completed an anniversary just a few months [...]
Now well into the third century since our nation’s birth, imaginative conservatives can’t help but wonder where we might be in the life of the Republic. It is instructive to note that when our Founders were preparing to give birth to our Republic, they were imagining the end of the Roman Republic and pondering how to keep [...]