We should learn from the political credo of the Venetians, who never forgot the history that had made them a special nation. To be a patriot is to embody our connection to the national bond through devotion to a "practice." It is good to be enthralled by dogmas of the quiet past, remembering who and [...]
Our rights as Americans can never be separated from our duties. But we must also ask, what is our liberty for? We live in an age of determinism, especially when it comes to academics and academia. There’s little choice, it seems, and everything is driven by some autonomous and often abstract forces, progressively (often) and [...]
If a democracy drifts into unlimited notions of freedom, the best course of action is not to strip citizens of freedom, but rather to educate them, so that they can correct any constitutional abuses that contributed or led the way to the abyss of nihilism. Introduction This essay will revisit the age-old concern with the [...]
A political system, however efficient, cannot be good if it clashes with ethics. We have to work for the restoration of local autonomy. There are things in which centralized control is necessary and beneficent; but there is a vast multitude of things in which it is unnecessary, and derogatory to human freedom and responsibility. Man [...]
Looking back, I think there were three reasons why I left social media. Maybe my testimony can help someone who contemplates the plunge. I can say that it was well worth it. With the publication of my book, Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here [...]
The Articles of Confederation were doomed by their perceived structural weakness. Yet defenders of the Articles at the time correctly pointed out that this early constitution, drafted under intense pressure at a critical time in the country’s history and intended to deal foremost with the exigencies of war, had been remarkably successful. The Declaration of [...]
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 [...]
We need a return to Christian order and freedom, with God at its center. Only then will society no longer appear broken, and things will work properly. A general sense that society is broken prevails in America today. Polls show that people are not satisfied with the direction the nation is going. Things and institutions [...]
Sidney Hook believed the university to be a community of scholars bound together by the ties of civility and intellectual respect, pursuing the truths, the goods, and the beauties—multiple visions which inspire the life of the mind. Those who accept this conception, he believed, must dedicate themselves to help those misguided students and their allies [...]
In 1900, Jean Sibelius revised his patriotic tone-poem, “Finlandia,” and its popularity grew in leaps and bounds. Suddenly the world knew about Sibelius, “Finlandia,” and Finnish national pride. Jean Sibelius Jean Sibelius’ tone-poem, Finlandia, wasn’t supposed to be the program headliner that Saturday night at the San Francisco Symphony. The main draw was the Sibelius Violin [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]
The challenge we face today is humanizing a Bureaucratic Regime, just as our ancestors humanized a German warrior regime. We’re in the position of the Apostle Paul, handcuffed to a Praetorian guard. As the Bubble grows more psychotic and inhumane, opportunities for evangelistic kindness and witness multiply exponentially. As we survey our emerging Bureaucratic Regime [...]
Distributism is the only practical solution to the problem of rampant corporatism and the globalism which is its inevitable consequence. Next time we raise a glass of craft-brewed ale, we should not merely enjoy its flavor, we should also raise a toast to the political and economic freedom that it represents. Some time ago I [...]
Jonathan Edwards helped to invent a new America, committed to a national covenant and an unprecedented spiritual egalitarianism. In 1930, the historian Henry Bamford Parkes critically assessed the legacy of America’s most famous Puritan intellectual, Jonathan Edwards. According to Parkes, “it is hardly a hyperbole to say that, if Edwards had never lived, there would [...]