Time to Return to Medieval Courtesy Books

By |2021-08-29T17:54:53-05:00August 29th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, John Horvat|

Manners are not artificial rules for controlling people's lives. They are the commonsense guidelines developed over time by Christian peoples to facilitate the practice of virtue. Courtesy books made this process easier since they helped create good habits early in children's souls before vices could gain a foothold. To the "woke" crowd, teaching civility and [...]

Living Room Vexations

By |2021-08-11T21:34:30-05:00August 11th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, Community, Culture War, Politics|

From innumerable living room debates, I see people not only do not know how to argue, but do not care to. Instead they leap to quarrel, so that interruptions, interjections, a raised rate and volume of speech, heightened emotion, the dismissive sneer, and the personal attack become ‘rebuttal.’ The olden days. We professed rhetoric, always [...]

Consumers Need Wisdom, Not More Marketing

By |2021-07-27T08:12:49-05:00July 27th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, Economics, John Horvat|

The quest for tranquility is not found in a world of frenetic intemperance and agitated markets. Tranquility is an interior movement that presupposes a soul at peace. Wisdom is the virtue of seeking the highest cause of things. Only a society that facilitates wisdom can provide peace and order. Marketers typically create excitement around a [...]

The Loving Society versus Rocket Science

By |2021-04-14T16:43:02-05:00April 14th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, Community, Joseph Pearce, Love, Senior Contributors|

Love, as the foundational principle of a loving society, is analogous to the arithmetic which forms the foundations of rocket science. Today, however, we live in a society that does not know the basic laws of love. Our society must once again learn to love, turning its back on pride, or it will destroy itself [...]

Baseball Goes For Woke

By |2021-04-27T20:52:19-05:00April 6th, 2021|Categories: Baseball, Civil Society, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

In a sadly predictable development, Major League Baseball continues to go the way of the Woke, demonstrating a contempt for its audience and the players' and owners' narcissistic need for self-validation through virtue-signaling. This past weekend I tried listening to an Orioles game for the first time since swearing off baseball last year because of [...]

Maoism in America? The Uses of the Capitol Hill Riot

By |2021-04-22T09:27:16-05:00March 10th, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Civil Society, Liberty|

Decades of the practice of Maoism in China have shown that when government opponents are branded as "insurrectionists," and when the powerless masses act only out of fear, civil society won’t survive. This is a trajectory with which we Chinese are all too familiar. From "deplorables" to "enemies of the people"—this is a trajectory with [...]

Biden’s America: One Nation or Us Versus Them?

By |2021-01-23T13:45:34-06:00January 22nd, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Civil Society, Joseph Biden, Pat Buchanan, Presidency|

Joe Biden's inaugural address was the most confusing, contradictory and incoherent ever delivered from the steps of the Capitol, reflective of the mind of its author and the state of the Union he now leads. "We have met the enemy and he is us," said Walt Kelly's cartoon character Pogo, half a century ago, about [...]

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”: When Yesterday Is Cancelled

By |2021-01-12T01:00:11-06:00January 11th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, Joseph Mussomeli, Politics, Senior Contributors|

The only time you can be really sure that both the Republicans and Democrats are wrong is when they all agree with each other. This is certainly true in the recent case of poor Representative Mary Miller, besieged and berated on all sides for saying something that very few of us would ever really dispute. [...]

Institutionalized Obedience: Americans & the Lockdowns

By |2021-01-12T10:56:12-06:00January 11th, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Civil Society, Liberty|

This year, against the backdrop of pandemic, the level of obedience manifested in many Americans stunned me: Why do Americans, the rugged individualists, obey edicts issued at the whim of “King” Newsom or “His Majesty” Cuomo, without a questioning of the legitimacy of those mandates? They remind me of my fellow Chinese who have been [...]

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