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 [...]
The irony of the prosperous decade of the 1950s is that the most popular person on the most visible proof of that prosperity—television—was a Catholic Bishop: "America’s Bishop," Fulton J. Sheen, who rejected feel-good, dishwater Christianity and instead boldly proclaimed the truth to his audience, 70% of whom were non-Catholic. Happiness, says the wicked Ambrose [...]
American wars produce songs of hope, encouragement, nostalgia, longing, sadness, and humor. Only one war produced a stirring song of triumphalist heresy. The war that made us independent gave us “Yankee Doodle,” a frivolous tune that threw back in the face of the Brits a term they had used to belittle us. The most popular [...]
As we celebrate the documents produced by the generation that also gave us Paul Revere, let us remember that they knew something that we have largely forgotten: the richness of community life that lay behind those documents, and without which they would never have been written. We celebrate this weekend a common declaration of independence, [...]
“Of all these sports,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1893, “there is no better sport than football.” As in many things, TR was on the cutting edge of cultural opinion in the United States, as it was about to takes its place among the powers of the world. That he too often conflated football and world [...]
The late Steve Masty’s “The Test of the Magi” is a novel that displays a powerful religious imagination and a profound knowledge of the history and cultures of the ancient world, as well as personal experience with the geography and anthropology of the middle east. The Test of the Magi, by Johannes Bergmann (254 pages, [...]
This is a quirky list. I sit here with tattered old books, some new ones, and my Kindle, and love them all; and offer ten that I have read in the years since my retirement from full-time teaching. Each has given me joy, and each speaks to what Brad Birzer calls the “human condition.” Booth [...]
It is up to our “little platoons” to restore the respect for work that alone can restore health to an economic order. It is a long road, but a good start on going down the that road is to read carefully our historians and poets. M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets: [...]
There is something uniquely awful about children getting gunned down. But in terms of school security, the good news is that we are still free enough to use existing laws and institutions to experiment in states and local communities, in government and private schools, to see what works… One principle that should unite all serious [...]
The theme of C.R. Wiley’s “Man of the House” is that the Great Progressive Fallacy—the individual is the moral center of the culture, and that the state is the individual’s protector—serves only the forces of destruction… Man of the House: A Handbook for Building a Shelter that will Last in a World that is Falling [...]
Donald Trump has felt the pulse of the people and taken into account the meaning (and limits) of the Constitution and come up with the outlines of a plan that is both reasonably coherent and (dare I say?) conservative. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” —Sun-tzu, ca. 400 BC; or Machiavelli, 1520 AD [...]
The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, by Arthur C. Brooks (Broadside Books, 2015) The great Elton Trueblood, who really did write about happiness, said many times that you can write a book of any length, but if you want people to read it, make it around 100 pages. [...]
The last clear memory I have of my great-uncle Atwood Putnam (yes, his ancestors were those Putnams, including “Old Wolf” Israel, but we never got any of the money—well, more about that later) was of him chasing several of his great-grandchildren down the gravel driveway that led to his shack, barefoot, floppy red felt hat [...]
Lyndon Baines Johnson was about as politically and morally corrupt as anyone who has served in the highest office in the republic, and he was intellectually ill-prepared to be the leader of a coherent liberal or progressive vision for America. Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics. Ambrose Bierce, The [...]