“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 [...]
Like a queen who rides a bicycle, Tom Holland’s “Dominion” is both majestic and down-to-earth. From antiquity to modernity, Mr. Holland traces a sneaky thesis that Christianity has changed the world—transforming it from the inside out. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (624 pages, Basic Books, 2019) Every once in [...]
Understanding who we are is an essential question to culture because the answer we give to that question affects how we understand our history, identity, and the symbolism—sacred and secular—that goes with it. Yet, there are many conservatives who have not the slightest inkling of this phenomenon. What is culture? “Culture War” has reentered the [...]
There are dark corners to be explored in a great church. Instead of vast seating space, bright with electric light, huge speakers hanging from the beams, and padded pews, give me the darkened chapel where ancient monks recited their daily prayers. Give me the dark corner of a crumbling cloister, the dark corner of a [...]
Can “free trade,” as understood by Adam Smith, bring peace among nations? Or does it just allow the strongest nations to become imperial powers? In answering these questions, we must keep in mind that Smith was an economist and not a prophet. In all normal civilisations the trader existed and must exist. But in all [...]
“Imperial Legacies” is a spirited polemic that exposes the misunderstandings, cynical disregard, and hypocrisy surrounding the history of the British Empire. Jeremy Black systematically debunks the ideologies of “decolonization” and postcolonial resentment and shows the harm of dismissing British history as a story of monolithic oppression. Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World, by [...]
Modern conservative fondness for the age of the suit is rooted in a sense of order, decency, and the natural. There is a profound irony in this, however: the conservative heroes who lived through that age were decidedly less enthusiastic about its fashions. Since at least the publication of The Young Fogey Handbook in 1985, [...]
Every person—the born and unborn, the poor, the downcast, the disabled, the infirm, and the elderly—has inherent value. Although each journey is different, no life is without worth or is inconsequential; the rights of all people must be defended. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our Nation proudly and strongly reaffirms our commitment to [...]
For many First World countries, the most compelling concerns do not involve climate change but population decline. The tribes of Europe, the peoples of almost every country of the Old Continent, are visibly aging, shrinking, and dying. If birth rates do not rise we are talking here about what historians, a century hence, will call [...]
The moral imagination of E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology discerned great value in the cultures he studied, and he spoke out against the destruction of that value. By doing so he exhibited the finest elements of his own particular Western cultural inheritance, as a Christian, English gentleman, who was later, and appropriately, knighted. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of [...]
Though counter-globalist, Cardinal Robert Sarah’s “The Day Is Now Far Spent” is not anti-Western, but is an emphatic rejection of liberal anthropology—which strikes him as blasphemous, positing a decontextualized individual, one who needs neither family nor neighbor nor even God Almighty. The Day Is Now Far Spent, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (385 pages, Ignatius Press, [...]
Twenty-four centuries after his death, the words of Socrates can still unsettle an attentive listener. However, before we can understand his most famous dictum, we must clear away who we are not to grasp who we are—something only done when we are grounded in the fundamental relationships that are universal to humankind. Probably, the most [...]
With the loss of traditional religion as the guiding force of the Western world, following the collapse of the Medieval around 1350, politics quickly became not just a substitute, but a religion in and of itself, a proto-ideology serving as a glue for the emerging nation-states of Europe. Certainties that the Medievals had taken for [...]
Traditionally, the type of men that women wanted to marry embodied all the classic standards of male achievement: educated, physically fit, able to hold down a job. But in 1960, everything changed. A watershed moment produced an oral contraceptive known as “the pill.” No innovation has fundamentally altered the premises of civilization quite like birth [...]