A friend and colleague often forces me to read The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a dreary compendium of leftist ideology and smug conventional wisdom he enjoys using to depress me. Nonetheless, I do occasionally read beyond the opening paragraphs to see what I would be thinking if only I were as “smart” as I [...]
Even during an age in which acts of callous brutality have become common, the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell shocks. It was Gosnell who ran the filthy abortion clinic in which live babies were murdered, women were subjected to “treatment” by unlicensed assistants (including massive and even deadly doses of drugs), and fetal remains were [...]
The news headlines remain depressing, of course. Innocents have been killed and maimed in Boston through an act of spiteful hatred. Revelations of the chillingly casual killing of innocents in a Philadelphia abortion clinic continue to seep into our ideologically anesthetized and unapologetic mainstream press. The Affordable Care Act wheezes toward completion for itself, and for [...]
Years ago, while I was teaching at a left-wing liberal arts college (one of those places where the students wear black to show how depressing it is to be young and well off) a colleague bragged to me about a study he had done on how to keep convicted criminals from returning to a life of [...]
As we enter a new era, in which successive generations of “post-Christian” policy, ideology, and cultural disintegration render us a largely non-Christian society, the signal importance of Christian Humanism becomes clear. The Common Mind: Politics, Society and Christian Humanism from Thomas More to Russell Kirk, by Andre Gushurst-Moore (264 pages, Angelico Press, 2013) Andre Gushurst-Moore’s [...]
“Jurisprudence” generally is defined as “the philosophy or science of law.” Pardon the pun, but the definition does not do justice to the topic. Questions like “what is law?” and “what is justice?” and “how do we judge the first in relation to the second?” are intrinsically interesting, as well as important. The definition is, [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Featured Book: The crux of Murray’s argument is that in order to be happy, individuals must be members of communities. Through an unerring use of examples drawn from social science, Charles Murray shows how we know, or should know, that people have a need for close personal [...]
The diocese of Lansing, where I currently attend mass, is a pretty good one, as such things go in the contemporary United States. Our parish has a very good priest and I am confident we will not soon be joining in on the practice I have seen in the archdiocese of Detroit of worshipping in the [...]
The foolishness of various historical readings of our constitutional tradition as a story of oppression must be combated with truth. As with so much else, we have a great deal of work to do before we can recover the knowledge, let alone the wisdom, of the forebears who built the edifice we have spent generations [...]
Some of us remember Democrats’ claim during the Obamacare debate that “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.” The claim was made as part of a “compromise” position in which the Democrats gave up on a “single payer system.” That is, in order to get enough votes to pass their program, [...]
One of the few relatively good things about listening to National Proletarian/Public Radio is the insight it can give one into why our culture is dying. Case in point: a recent story on All Things Liberal/Considered on a study regarding whether children “make us happy.” It seems that researchers asked a group of working men [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, [...]
How convenient. By the same token, of course, to say that a “good” message makes for good art is both foolish and dangerous. Just as the “art” of Socialist Realism, with its paintings of stylized scenes of heroism in the name of “the workers,” is both nasty, lying propaganda and schlock, so the various renderings of “The [...]
How should a conservative interact with popular culture? We live in a time when popular music mocks religion, prime time television depicts homosexual relations and multi-generational groupings as “the new normal,” films depict literal orgies of gory sadism, and all promote narcissistic nihilism with a snarky self-confidence expressed in gutter language. How should we respond [...]