The lack of any serious communal ascetical practices during Lent and throughout the year is one of the defining weaknesses of modern Christians. What the Catholic Church and various Protestants need is a return to real fasting that is accompanied by both almsgiving and attention to prayer. What are you giving up for Lent? This [...]
We need a culture in which the truly good figures of our past are not canceled because they did not talk in the same way as we do about moral and social issues. We also need a culture in which local and state figures are considered just as important as those on the national level. [...]
“The Heart of Culture” traces the success of Western education, rooted in the very nature of Western civilization as a historical “clash and combination” of Greek culture and Judeo-Christian religion. It is the perfect book for parents, teachers, and administrators who are dissatisfied with modern education but don’t know why. The Heart of Culture: A [...]
The social-media giants won't stop censoring conservative speech anytime soon. Why would they? The reality is that conservatives must fight back against big tech immediately. Here are several ways to do it. Will you see this essay on Facebook or Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. The two major social media networks have been censoring political speech [...]
Those who stormed the Capitol are enemies of our country, but they have no public or political support that will allow them to commit large-scale violence or effect change in our country. The danger they pose to our commonweal is much less than the danger posed by the radicals being coddled and protected by a [...]
Conservatives tend to be skeptical about the doom-and-gloom scenarios that are being presented as absolute certainties unless the country as a whole is essentially shut down for months. Many have called us “deniers” or accused us of valuing money over human life. But I believe that this skepticism is both eminently reasonable and will prove [...]
Just as the advent of the Savior at Christmastime did not eliminate the consequences of human sin and foolishness but opened a new way forward, so too the vision of Jack Campbell in “The Family Man” does not change his wasted last thirteen years but opens up the possibility of a very different future for [...]
As St. John Henry Newman explains in his book “The Idea of a University,” education is the process by which a mind is formed not just to learn facts and ideas but to be able to think about how they are connected. And when Newman gives an image for that process, he points toward a [...]
I worry that a society that ceases to marvel at the actions of daredevils is in danger. Though their moral calculus is not always straightforward and though I have no wish to imitate such actors, I view them at the end of the current year with new eyes. We should watch, listen, and ask if [...]
Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” is the story of Anne Elliott, who has broken one engagement, rejected another, and is still single and pining after the man whom she would have married. Austen brings the theme of right marriage to perfection here: Nobility of heart and mind is more important than nobility of title and excess of [...]
The 2019 film “Fighting With My Family,” though not life-changing, is a nice change of pace from the movies where doing one’s own thing is depicted as the heroic, authentic thing. It is pleasantly anti-modern in its conception of family and work, as the family’s good is portrayed as more important than self-doubts about “what [...]
Professor Edward E. Ericson, Jr. was an intellectual father to me. He shared the belief of the Russians that great literature can change lives, and that true literature which does not forget God or man or the particularities of life is ultimately more powerful than politics or even political philosophy. It might be mom or [...]
Other university presidents, provosts, and deans need to support and emulate President Morton Schapiro of Northwestern University. If they can find the courage to support somebody else standing up against the mob, they might find that they have the courage to stand up to their own mobs and discover that when there is no pursuit [...]
Science does not give us all the answers. When it comes to forming policy, there are no technocratic answers. The Great Barrington Declaration is a sensible statement by a group of scientists daring to stand against the “consensus” of experts. It is based not merely on science but on prudent thought based on a broader [...]