James Henry Stark was a historian and defender of the Loyalists in an age of high reverence for the American Revolution. Stark’s unhappiness at the public presentation and textbook renderings of the Revolution seethed for years, until finally in 1910 he published “Loyalists of Massachusetts” to settle the debate. In March 1910, the wealthy [...]
I like the idea of celebrating “homo faber”—man the maker or worker. Work is something that is part of our dignity, a triumph of the human spirit. The celebration of work is something desperately needed in our culture today. “Why are we celebrating Labor Day? You don’t belong to a labor union,” one of [...]
For nearly fifty years, we have taught American children that the three greatest determinants in history are race, class, and gender. Virtue is scoffed at; “Great Men” are mocked; and free will is ignored. Should we be shocked—do we even have the right to be shocked—that our press, our culture, and our educators are obsessed [...]
George Kennan was—and remains—an important, even compelling, figure in the early history of the Cold War. But these selections from his voluminous and often overwrought diaries reveal him to have been something other than what this honest, if not always moderate, this calm, but not always cool, and detached professional diplomat took himself to [...]
Will we have a recession in the next year or so? I don’t know. As an old joke has it—one that I’ve seen several times in the last week or so—many were those smart enough to have predicted seven of the last three recessions. My question, moral rather than strictly predictive, is whether we [...]
The central moral issue regarding both the atomic bomb and fire-bombings of cities is whether or not civilians play a key role in a ‘total war.’ When an entire society is mobilized for war, who is making the war possible through production of weapons and materials? What’s the line between combatant and non-combatant? One of [...]
John Courtney Murray’s “We Hold These Truths” is hardly a tumbleweed of early-twentieth-century Catholic social thought. Though it initially helped to reconcile Catholicism and the religious pluralism that our nation champions, it is also a work that deals deeply with that taboo concept of today: patriotism. Reading John Courtney Murray’s famous work, We Hold [...]
In order to avoid socialism, we need to embrace a true vision of what business is for; CEOs and shareholders should be thinking about their businesses as having deeper, human ends. While businesses aren’t charities, they require justice and charity in those who own and direct them. A couple years ago at a conference [...]
It is essential that each new generation understand the meaning of the United States Constitution. Without an adequate understanding of the Constitution’s moral and cultural prerequisites, Democrats and Republicans will lack the moral and imaginative qualities necessary to cooperate; hence free government, which is dependent on inner ethical control, will be imperiled. Today’s offering [...]
The real problem in the modern world is not that there are too many babies, but too few. In the end, both economics and environmentalism depend upon people. Money and the earth are made for man, and not man for money and the earth. The fashionable mindset among celebrities, royals, and too many ordinary [...]
What is American democracy, and why is it worth defending? The current political climate, in which democracy is increasingly (and troublingly) equated with populism, compels us to reflect on this question. Democracy is an ancient form of government, but historically, democracies that rise above mere mob rule and reflect genuine self-governance, while respecting basic [...]
History is complex, messy, and unyielding to our dearest wishes for easy categorization. That Alexander Stephens understood the Confederacy through its cornerstone of slavery is plainly true and explained in his own words. But the “Cornerstone Speech” goes further, planting the other corners of the Confederate state in concerns over federalism and sovereignty. Anxious [...]
The architects of the Great War set the world on the path to self-destruction. Although the worst has not taken place, the world still treads along the same perilous course. For human beings have yet to devise a sure way of imposing rational limits on irrational acts of violence. I. The Progressives could not [...]
James Madison wrote in “The Federalist” that the Constitution puts the states to the test: The stronger federal government will inaugurate a kind of competition in good government, breaking the states’ monopolies… Having founded republican regimes in America, regimes animated by respect for the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as enunciated in [...]