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 [...]
The Invention of Science by David Wootton is a dense, thought-provoking, and encyclopedic account of the Scientific Revolution. The book is an intellectual history, focusing mainly on the mental paradigm shift that the Revolution brought to Western Civilization. How man thinks about the natural world post-Revolution is not the same as how man thought before it, [...]
Perhaps no American thinker has suffered more from a scholarly hegemony of discourse than John C. Calhoun, whose work and personage are often dismissed by his critics for a single phrase attributed to him, diminishing the careful and complicated analysis he deserves. The careful reader does not have to be a devotee of Jürgen Habermas [...]
Are we a less free people, maybe even a far less free people, than we were in 1963? Partial punch-puller that he is content to be, Christopher Caldwell is not about to offer either a tentative or final answer to such questions. But the evidence that he presents strongly suggests that we are certainly a [...]
As the clock struck midnight to begin 2020, talk of a new “Roaring Twenties” began in earnest. This portends a wave of retrospectives, historical, fictional, and sensational. One of these will inevitably be Prohibition, the outlawing of the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” or their import/export into the United States and its territories. [...]
As coronavirus fatalities multiply these days—as COVID-19 leaves our bodies sick and makes our spirits sick at heart—I find myself asking how similar the mood today is to that of the West during the 1889-1890 flu pandemic. One of the world’s worst plagues occurred in 1889-1890. The so-called Russian flu is of particular interest to [...]
We were all riding high only recently, and suddenly, there’s not enough on the shelves of the grocery stores. How should we think about it all? The virtue of a curriculum like that at our college is that the sweep of it encompasses the memory of the most extraordinary challenges to human nature. Pandemics or [...]
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) remains Germany’s most popular poet and arguably its best alongside Friedrich Schiller.[1] Born in Frankfurt into a bourgeois upper-middle-class family, he spent his early years as a leading voice in the Romantic literary movement known as [...]
If we were to imagine ourselves standing on a hill, looking down on the full sweep of history stretched out before us in the valley of human memory, we would observe the social edifices of man rising and falling in revolutions with the periodicity of seasons. We would witness hands reaching up like a wave [...]
The admonitions of Byzantine’s unionists resonate well beyond the Fall of Constantinople—if we had but ears to hear them. Indeed, we today, standing amidst the threatened walls of the house of the West that was once known as Christendom must cherish a culture of Christian solidarity, the conviction that the City of God is and [...]
During the Japanese-American internment of 1942-1946, there arose a style of art that drew from elements and techniques of Western and traditional Japanese forms. Through a closer look at these works of art, Japanese-American internment art can serve to reflect the internees’ cultural, social, and political resilience while also allowing us to study the forms [...]
“Citizenship” means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country. Today, we must redouble our efforts to make that past our own, and then be about the business of passing it on. We Americans [...]
Like a queen who rides a bicycle, Tom Holland’s “Dominion” is both majestic and down-to-earth. From antiquity to modernity, Mr. Holland traces a sneaky thesis that Christianity has changed the world—transforming it from the inside out. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (624 pages, Basic Books, 2019) Every once in [...]
The Unanimous Declaration of Independence made by the Delegates of the People of Texas in General Convention at the Town of Washington on the 2nd day of March 1836 When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement [...]