The title Lost in the Cosmos is meant to be a correction to Carl Sagan’s “splendid picture book” Cosmos, which Walker Percy understands as a failed self-help book. Sagan aims to get our minds off our insignificant selves by getting it on the magnificence of the stars and planets. Every moment in scientific progress has been [...]
So lots of readers (about six) have written me asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around. Here’s my recommendation: Lost in the Cosmos by the philosopher-physician-novelist Walker Percy. It was published in 1983, and I’m one of the very few Americans celebrating the book’s 30th anniversary. Several posts will [...]
Whit Stillman’s films, which he both writes and directs, are rather Socratic, Christian, and at least ambiguously conservative. For an audience that for the most part possesses none of those qualities, he presents his insight lightly and indirectly. Only occasionally does he allow us to glimpse the extent of his ambition. He told a Psychology [...]
So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore. The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is. The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [...]
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational "outcomes" in a long time. The great benefit of education, "the key to increasingly upward mobility," is expanding the vocabulary of students. Why is that? Hirsch observes that "vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of [...]
Downton Abbey cast So what will you be doing Sunday night? My advice: Watch more TV! Now you innovative and disruptive TIC readers might think you don’t have the time. But that’s only because you’ve forgotten about “multitasking.” Professors, for example, can be watching while grading papers and filling out assessment rubrics. Some [...]
That Lena Dunham commercial might have made a real contribution to enhancing the president’s turnout, for all I know. Certainly it was consistent with the Democratic convention’s insistent appeal to women’s rights, especially the rights of single women. But there’s at least one irony: Dunham is a genuine defender of women’s right to choose, but [...]
Steven Mazie does well to criticize the complacency of Stephen Asma. Asma, citing obvious facts of evolutionary psychology, observes that our natural powers of knowing and loving are limited. So “universal love” is impossible. Our “empathy” extends with any significant force only to our family, friends, and “tribe.” According to the evolutionary psychologist, we are [...]
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of [...]
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 [...]
The Democrats, at their convention, stood so stridently for the rights of the liberated single woman that they offered the Republicans the opportunity to counter with a defense of the moral virtue of ordinary Americans devoted to God, family, country, and worthwhile work well done. Most Americans, it goes without saying, are repulsed by the [...]
Here’s a sign that we see in front lawns all across Rome/Floyd County, GA: “Christmas is a Birthday!” And it is! Well, everyone knows that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25. But there’s no particular reason that birthdays have to be exact. We’re not remembering the date, we’re remembering something unique, irreplaceable, something most [...]
Peter Lawler on conservatism So David Brooks’s article is interesting more for its listing of various young conservatives than its actual content. I just don’t have time to comment much right now, but I thought I’d get it out there for your consideration. My talking points for now are pretty random: Pete Spiliakos [...]
Thanksgiving is the holiday that brings us all together, whether or not we’re Christians and whether or not we’re American citizens. It’s the first holiday of the Holiday Season that begins around now and lasts until New Year. We’re so sure that saying Merry Christmas is intolerant and dogmatic that we’re all about Happy Holidays—an [...]