What made Aaron Feuerstein famous was not success but his attitude in the face of catastrophe. When a fire destroyed the textile mill he owned, he faced the decisions of whether to rebuild and whether to continue to pay his 1,400 workers, who were left destitute in the dead of winter. His decision became a [...]
Is Robert Nisbet’s “The Quest for Community” a historical artifact or a living source of wisdom? Has his insight into the natural human desire for community become a moot point in light of the rise of the State, which has replaced the church, family, and neighborhood? Of the many books that Robert Nisbet wrote during [...]
The solution America needs involves creating deep and enduring bonds through which outstanding individuals, with grit and God’s good help, get things done. Amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, a glimmer of honor appeared on the horizon. A group of American veterans helped evacuate fellow Americans and faithful Afghans left behind with the Taliban. These [...]
How are evangelicals to navigate the current storms while remaining faithful to biblical truth and Christian compassion? How can we engage in true Christian dialogue without immediately pigeonholing our fellow evangelicals politically, or questioning their “true” motives, or holding them to a narrow litmus test of orthodoxy? The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims, by [...]
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 [...]
A ride on the river and a small-town celebration are a perfect way to spend a summer Sunday. “Dave, let’s go rafting.” It was my friend Ujae (pronounced You-jay), one of those fabulous immigrants (he’s Korean) who love America passionately and understand that it is both still a place of opportunity for one who hustles [...]
What really made me love New York City was the discovery of some of those conscious forces G.K. Chesterton talked about. I discovered that not only were the famous five boroughs their own conscious forces, but within the boroughs were smaller forces—neighborhoods just as homey and parochial as any small town anywhere. Though I grew [...]
Blue Highways Conservatism embodies the restoration of individual rights, humane national loyalty, and confidence in the American spirit. It looks to the towns without malls, and the in-between places, to speak with an authentic voice in an attempt to foster community and the restoration of public virtue necessary to sustain democracy in America. The joy of reading [...]
When the pandemic separated us from our sacred spaces like the church or other communal places, Zoom promised connection. However, Zoom—as a medium of education and relationship—prevents us from truly connecting because of technology’s nature to divide, distract, and isolate. But when it came to the subject of letters, Theuth said, ‘But this study, King [...]
The culture of a real community like that of college isn’t simply a matter of texts and discussions of ideas, but of live emotion and thought, real presence to each other, a continuous awareness and exchange that locates each person in the larger community. Yesterday afternoon, during one of our regular meetings with the freshman [...]
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 [...]
Owen Barfield called upon the men of the Western world to form themselves into a “commonwealth of the spirit” in which there is no copyright. To create a commonwealth of the soul, we need to know the limits and range of individualism as well as the limits and range of national character. Shortly after Great [...]
Though rooted in a certain time and a certain place, elements of John Winthrop’s teachings are timeless, and, whether we agree with him completely or not, we should recognize him as an important and imaginative conservative of yesteryear. Between 1629 and 1640, roughly 21,000 Puritans (and servants) immigrated from England (especially East Anglia) to New [...]
American democracy has proven to be a success in its representation of interests but a failure in cultivating citizenship; it has protected some civil liberties while allowing others to erode away. One lesson we can draw from its history of successes and failures is this: For a republic to succeed, institutions are not enough; civic [...]