Here is a rather silly story, brought to my attention by The Imaginative Conservative’s own Stephen Masty. It should tell us something about how very silly lawyers’ views of morals and the law have become in recent years. According to Religion News Service, among others, one Dola Indidis, a lawyer in Kenya, has petitioned the International [...]
Attorney General Eric Holder Eric Holder, the Attorney General who brought us, among other things, the Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, along with its cover up, and a sneering rejection of Congress for finding him in contempt, has struck another blow against the rule of law. Holder has decided that he does not [...]
Mark Twain, that teller of tall tales from the American frontier, has an almost mythical status in American literature and culture. The white suit, the wild hair, and the homespun humor have combined to add to his obvious literary skills a mystique that has spawned heroic portrayals in biographical one-man shows and works of fiction [...]
The summer of 2013 saw strikes by fast food workers in seven cities. I doubt the increased difficulty in getting burgers and fries will endanger the republic. But we really should consider what this development tells us about conditions in our economy and our culture. Few of us think about it, but economists and policymakers [...]
I have always hesitated to comment on the state of our military culture. I have never served and, for a variety of reasons, seriously doubt I ever will be (or ever would have been) called upon to enter combat. But over the years I have come to know a number of military families reasonably well, and to [...]
A Summer 2013 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, (“Saying No to Teach for America”) provides yet another indication of why our children are becoming ever-less educated despite the billions we put into their education. The story tells of Teach for America’s travails in the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Teach for America is a [...]
Mecosta’s Fourth of July, while rather grand for its size, would hardly compete with the spectacle in one of our large cities. Thank goodness. For several years, now, my family and I have spent the Fourth of July in Mecosta, Michigan. It is a small, somewhat unprepossessing town. But it has a number of important [...]
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent Supreme Court decisions concerning same-sex marriage has, or should have, nothing to do with the (supremely important) issue of the relationship between family and society. From a legal and constitutional standpoint, the greatest damage done by these decisions was done long before they were handed down. For [...]
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are often quoted, but seldom taken to heart. Even those of us who consider ourselves students of Eliot’s work on civilization’s decline tend to overdramatize what is really a quite tawdry cultural age. [...]
Some conservatives, and our libertarian friends in particular, have been rather enjoying hearing about recent Obama Administration scandals. I would not begrudge anyone a certain amount of perverse pleasure in the discomforts of an administration that has been seeking to undermine our culture, way of life, and economic freedom since day one. But I honestly [...]
Oftentimes we need to be reminded that we are more than animals. The attachment modern society has to stoking the fires of primitive passions we share with the beasts (feast, fight, fornicate) is literally dehumanizing—it makes us less than we by nature are. This, of course, is the very essence of corruption and causes great [...]
Edmund Burke The awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and…having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to [...]
No longer recognizing our duty to form children’s character to fit the norms of virtue, our society more and more sees children as a burden to be indoctrinated into autonomous self-sufficiency as quickly as possible. Now even the Boy Scouts, for so many decades dedicated to forming virtuous young men, sees itself as just another [...]
In responding to a post of mine criticizing our liberal culture for its hostility toward the traditional family, a commenter wrote: “I do not know a single liberal who…does not value (and participate in) both traditional and non-traditional families.” I think it is important to examine this liberal response to conservative criticism, not because the [...]