In the retrospect of forty years I can see my book, The Quest for Community (first published by Oxford University Press in 1953), as one of the harbingers of what would become by the end of the 1950s a full-fledged renascence of conservatism. There had been authentic and forthright individual conservatives before the 50s; among [...]
The controversy over a Super Bowl ad for a snack chip that allegedly “humanized,” of all things, a pre-born human being highlights the deliberate rejection of reality of the “abortion rights” objectors. On its face, as others have noted, the controversy exposes the pernicious obfuscation that a fetus is nothing more than a “meaningless blob [...]
The liberal arts college is a place to learn the values of community and communal learning. But today we promote, through online courses and career-focused curricula, a culture of individualism that is anathema to the liberal democratic project. College, for me, has always been something of an interstitial space: an oasis between adolescence and adulthood, [...]
Like many people I found the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference a little unsettling. And yet, unlike many people, my concerns had little or nothing to do with the issue of climate change itself. Whether global warming is actually happening or not, and whether, if it is happening, it is caused by manmade pollution, [...]
The problem of political unity is a perennial question of political philosophy because it is always timely. How do the many become and remain one body politic? In other words, how can a plurality of individuals, all with their own immediate concerns, aptitudes, and interests, cohere as a single people or nation? This question is [...]
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom… The shout is a rattling of chains… Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking [...]
Of course, the real term is “The Benedict Option,” and it does not refer to our retired Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, but rather to St. Benedict of Nursia, who in the collapse of the Roman Empire fathered a way of living that kept Christian civilization alive: the monastic order. Oddly enough, like Benedict XVI, it [...]
Scratch the soul of many a conservative and beneath you will find a villager. Something is there that attracts these Americans to more natural and simpler lifestyles. Perhaps it is because organic and authentic things appear restful and reassuring in a world of uncertainties and anxieties. However, what makes the organic option particularly attractive to conservatives [...]
James Kirke Paulding affirmed the preeminence of place, tradition, and orthodoxy in the antebellum North even as he forces of capitalism, Evangelicalism, and materialistic modernity eroded the gentrified and agrarian culture of the Hudson River Valley. Paulding never wavered from his belief in prescriptive truth and the transcendence of place. He derided American democracy, viewing [...]
How should we judge the health of a culture? We might do it by pointing to its greatest virtues. The Greek city states between 500 and 300 B.C., though they were not especially densely populated, gave the West the architectural “language” it still employs for everything from grand hotels to private homes. The colonial house, [...]
The communitarian movement has arisen as an effort to address the evident and growing deficiencies of modern liberalism, which seems unable to think beyond the sovereign autonomy of rights-bearing individuals. But communitarianism has considerable deficiencies of its own. In particular, there is its propensity to use the language of “community” as a form of mood [...]
Today’s political debates often set up a simple tension: the individual versus government. Certainly individual liberty and limited government are fundamental principles of a free society, but such a polarized perspective overlooks the ways we actually live our lives—in families, as part of neighborhoods, in church communities, in civic groups, and so on. In this [...]
What happens when we enter a world of constant connection—a world in which technology infiltrates nearly every moment of our waking existence? “We all feel the porcupine quill of constant contact, the irritant of ever presence, and long to escape, if only for a moment,” Rabbi David Wolpe writes for TIME Magazine. But Wolpe also [...]
Cokie Roberts, a celebrated radio and television commentator, once participated in a discussion concerning congressional term limits and commented on American solidarity (or the lack thereof). She stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created.” This is a curious [...]