My feelings about personal injury lawyers are not universally negative, despite numerous examples of their misbehavior. I even harbor a certain tenderness toward them. This is because of their many clever billboard advertisements in Houston, which bring me daily amusement during my various commutes around the city. “Advocatus sed non latro, res miranda populo.” The above [...]
For the wage-earner of today, access to the resources of nature can be had only through wages. This means that the industrial community in which he lives, and for which he labors, shall provide him with the requisites of a decent livelihood in the form of living wages. When we consider man’s position in relation [...]
Tools are a significant part of the permanent things, but they are also relative to time, place, and function. That is, we are tool-using animals. Or to put it another way, we are an ingenious species, capable of creating hammers of nuanced proportions, and using them to build dwelling places and to kill other members [...]
Ideology is not only lazy, it is, at heart, criminal. There never was an ideology that allowed for the fullness of man. Always, ideology denigrates the truth and the dignity of the human person. One of the most dangerous things to come out of the French Revolution was the notion and norm of an ideology. [...]
If we truly want to overcome the curse of racism, we need to begin with restoring the humanities, the voice of the human race, to their rightful place at the heart of any good, true and beautiful education. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Destiny, a politically-charged play by the Marxist [...]
Our need for affirmation in the workplace easily takes the place of Jesus, who alone can free us and give us the grace to crush the idols we keep on our desks. We need to receive His easy yoke and reclaim our identities as children of God. Relentless ambition surrounded me when I lived in [...]
Wilhelm Röpke asked how to address the problems of social fragmentation and the loss of community feeling, in a world where the market is left to itself. Röpke’s own idea was that society is nurtured and perpetuated at the local level, through motives that are quite distinct from the pursuit of rational self interest. Two [...]
Ronald Reagan’s version of conservatism was far more pro-government than was Barry Goldwater’s. Compassion, not liberty, was Reagan’s guide. This raises the question: To what extent is the success of modern political conservatism dependent upon the conservation of liberal, even progressive, reforms? The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism [...]
American culture is surely decadent. Its decay is palpable to any sensitive observer who reads the feuilleton section of the local newspaper or attends a university. But is our decadence terminal? Is our civilization on a collision course with extinction? The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun (200 pages, Wesleyan University Press, 1989) Politically America [...]
By doing a certain thing, by perfecting a certain skill, by learning a certain trade, a man becomes specific, becomes particular. Today, however, labor no longer helps us become who we are, and so trivial things, like taste in music, rush in to fill the gap. The most tiresome part of living in a faux [...]
When he retired from public life in 1817, James Madison turned his full attention to averting a demographic catastrophe. He foresaw a time when a majority of the population would be “without land or other equivalent property and without the means or hope of acquiring it.” I. During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson struggled to [...]
Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
Prudence takes into account a deeper wisdom about the human condition than can be gleaned from a simple cost-benefit analysis. It understands that human communities are not merely about justice and the Gross Domestic Product, but about love. And sacrificial love doesn’t hesitate to rush in even against the worst odds. Recently I sat at [...]
In the liberal tradition, Adam is described as the one who must toil against a surrounding lack in order to be properly made man. But Genesis undercuts the idea that toil is man’s “lot,” if by it one means that toil is man’s by nature, in the order of Creation, rather than by punishment, in [...]