G.K. Chesterton prophesied that the attack on the family would intensify, and his writings were an attempt to provide ammunition for those who would be on hand when his prophecy came true. And now we have Dale Ahlquist to give us the best of Chesterton's writings on the family in what we hope will prove [...]
Who would have thought that Mother's Day would bring us the spectacle of churches attacked and Supreme Court Justices sought out at home to be demonstrated against and vilified for their reasonable beliefs? Indeed, many things in the contemporary world seem hard to believe. The idea that everything we experience could be an elaborate deception goes [...]
While outraged families are right to cut off Disney from their children’s imaginative formation, they should have been doing this a long time ago. The now-blatant sexual agenda of the corporation is only the final manifestation of a distorted and perverse view of reality that has pervaded the “Disney” brand for a long time. The [...]
In the realm of Catholic fiction, there is a great divide between popular fiction and that which attempts to be timeless literature. The former is good entertainment that takes place in a Catholic universe and incarnates Catholic themes; the second is at times overly didactic and even clumsily allegorical. The great literature successfully melds the [...]
The next utopia will simply be a new way of life—a “new world order” if you like. It will guarantee the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people through progress and pragmatic solutions. Moral considerations will not apply. While living in the UK, I observed a curious difference between the New World and the [...]
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 [...]
In the name of equality, the exclusively male draft could soon be discarded. Imposing the draft upon all young American women is a logical consequence of a new “woke” armed forces oriented not for war but inclusion and diversity. The American military has always had recourse to the draft in times of emergency. Through this [...]
The American community that I, a Chinese national, discovered on Perrin Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana, offers its members a supportive and loving world in which religious and cultural traditions are preserved and shared beliefs venerated. It embodies many meaningful elements indicative of the original form of the community, which are absent in the ersatz ones [...]
Without a deep religious faith, Whittaker Chambers could hardly have made his stand against Communism and, in fact, almost failed to do so. “The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.” —Stepan Trofimvovitch, in The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is the [...]
The boy I saw fishing was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. It made me realize that in leisure, we open ourselves to receive God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary. Be at leisure – and know [...]
I believe we are stepping into a new era for the arts, particularly for Christians and conservatives, if we are willing to fight hard for it. We have been hidden too long, and our new digital world, as foreign and alien as it may seem to the thoughtful artist, can be an ally rather than [...]
The battle for civilization requires knowledge of what is at its roots. Our digital culture is good for providing access, though of a precarious kind, to such knowledge. The battle also requires, however, habits of reading, listening, watching, thinking, and reflecting that are cultivated best in a non-digital environment. We are in a cold civil [...]
Easter’s supposed pre-Christian spring ritual roots are an opportunity to make the feast simply about bunnies, spring flowers, and eggs—all signs of spring without any of that obnoxious cross or empty tomb nonsense. Yet, the idea that Christians added Christ to a pre-existing Easter is standing on incredibly shaky ground. It is a well-known element [...]
In his latest book, Yuval Levin presents irrefutable evidence of America’s weakening attachment to its core institutions of family, community, voluntary associations, religions, and political parties. His goal, however, is to move beyond today’s ideological culture war and show how commitment to institutions puts us on an edifying path to belonging, social status, personal integrity, [...]