The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]
“Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality,” ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of President Obama’s second inaugural. There he declared: “What binds this nation together … what makes us–what makes us American–is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries [...]
Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution M.E. Bradford’s brief lives of the Founding Fathers, free of ideological prejudices, tell us the sort of delegates those fifty-five were: gentlemen, with few exceptions, attached to precedent and custom, prescription and “ancient constitutions.” Those colonial gentlemen, so very British, were not in [...]
Michael Bauman “The department of defense is a sinecure, a massive, unfathomable, black hole for taxpayer dollars that has never been, and perhaps never can be, plumbed to its hellish depths.” If Chuck Hagel really were qualified to be Secretary of Defense, and if he had the insight and courage necessary for the [...]
Garry Wills has continued to serve as the “go-to” guy for secular media types who need some spleen to pour on the Catholic Church. This past week, he admitted to NY Times readers that he finally had given up hope that the pope would stop being Catholic. (One wonders if he’s still trying to talk [...]
With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is [...]
Dr. Himmelman dumped her files onto the common-room table, made a cup of Earl Gray and sat down heavily. It didn’t take a world-famous clinician to see that she was having a bad day. “Looks like you’re having a bad day,” observed Barbara D’Angelo, a world-famous clinician. “Is it Charles again?” Janet shook her head [...]
Though written in the early twentieth century, Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee contains a vital message for the young men and women of today. Lee, especially as presented by Freeman, provides an excellent model for young people to emulate. “Teach him he must deny himself,” said Lee. That was the general’s advice [...]
David L. Schindler, in Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God, sees this as a technological age not simply because of technological advancements but because of the way we think as the result of our technological orientation. He shows, within the context of politics, economics, science, and cultural and professional life generally, that God-centered love is [...]
President Obama buttered up the American taxeaters with his syrupy State of the Union address on Fat Tuesday night by tabling a massive stack of new spending proposals that are selling like hotcakes with folks who will never have to pick up the tab. If enacted, these proposals will pancake employers, batter investors, and will [...]
Admirers of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (of which I am one–it is, for me, Lewis’s most compelling work of non-fiction), will remember that the inciting incident of his argument is a school textbook he calls, in order to save its authors from embarrassment, The Green Book. The moral theory Lewis discovers lying like a [...]
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to review Lord Percy’s Heresy of Democracy, a book Russell Kirk considered essential for an understanding of conservatism in the 1950s. Another book he had in list that was more or less unfamiliar to me was Ross J.S. Hoffman’s The Spirit of Politics and the Future of [...]
So I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I like granola. But since when did getting a little closer to nature make you a hippie? There’s probably a better word—but hippie just works for me. They’ve won by the way—the hippies I mean. Not the unkemptness thankfully, but the outlook. You can see [...]
Every so often, acts of horror and terror come together with days of repentance and fasting and prayer, and force us to consider how great, and how conditional, is God’s creation. February 13th & 14th were the 68th anniversary of one of the cruelest allied acts of World War II, which most Americans still consider [...]