We modern defenders of the liberal arts have to choose between Socrates’ vision and Cicero’s vision: Are we citizens of a particular soil and a particular place, or are we connected—across time and space—to all good men and God? A few weeks ago, I had the grand privilege of attending a Liberty Fund conference on [...]
We live in a time of gross lies in our public sphere. Many of the lies we tell these days involve phantom ills: racism or sexism or various “phobias” that must be exaggerated. Might these false and exaggerated fears be stand-ins for the real ills that we have suffered, but which we have not been [...]
“You Americans have no idea what you have here.” That line was spoken to me in heavily accented English roughly a half century ago. It hit me hard at the time, and it has popped into my head many times since. The speaker was a Czech immigrant, who also happened to be my landlord. A [...]
All Americans would probably agree that the current immigration situation is a mess. The proof of this is that no one can discuss the issue without having to defend something awful. Immigration hawks must argue for separating families and deporting people who contribute to the economy while immigration supporters have to account for the “bad [...]
“Citizenship” means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country. Today, we must redouble our efforts to make that past our own, and then be about the business of passing it on. We Americans [...]
The assumptions linked to the more deliberative, publicly responsible model of citizenship, though utopian and far-fetched at least within the perspective of modern, western society, can be thought of in a way that makes them seem more practical. Thomas Jefferson, for example, believed both that good government was possible only when those who governed were [...]
When I was forty years old, I left my native land to begin a new life with my new wife in the New World. Although I was escaping neither poverty nor persecution, I realized that I was now an immigrant. I could look at life and immigration from both sides now. Life is full of [...]
I could never again go home to Florence. Still, out of that dark beginning, God brought great good. What he allowed me to learn on my feet was a simple but life-altering truth: that my primary citizenship is not in Florence, nor in Rome, nor in any other earthly city. My true citizenship is in [...]
The danger today is not that too many are selectively and dishonestly quoting Thomas Aquinas to advance their own political agenda in ways that are unfaithful to his beliefs and intentions. The real point is that Christians have fallen into an appalling habit of censoring the very voices from the past that should be helping [...]
The Jeffersonian philosophy of rights and duties is not to be blamed for the explosion and inflation of rights. It is by doing our duties that we protect our rights, and rights come at cost of these duties. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Paul Kuntz as he [...]
While our political and cultural elites debate about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, it may be worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask what truly is at stake here. My sense is that the debate about illegal immigration–as well as over topics like same-sex marriage or national [...]
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and [...]
In addition to a desperate need for a revival of the Great Books to bring back some life in the barren world of modern education, the United States of America has been in trouble regarding political and a general civic ignorance. Historian Thomas Cahill once quipped that Rome fell when its people forgot what it [...]
We Americans will soon find ourselves in the maelstrom of another presidential election. Like most Americans, I am interested in what the candidates have to say about the economy and foreign policy, healthcare and immigration, pro-life matters and religious liberties. As a professor of Rhetoric, however, I am perhaps more interested than most of my [...]