I want my gadgets to work. I want the planes to fly on time. I want the electricity and internet to work. I want to use my useful things. I want to utilize my utilities, and who does not? Everyone values the efficient, effective, and economical solutions, and so it should be. For everyday problems [...]
Christians and Catholics, in particular, often have been on the front lines of battles supporting the rights and dignity of immigrants. From the “no Irish allowed” signs so common on the streets of nineteenth century America to opposition to immigrants from Southern Europe, the arrival of newcomers to this nation has occasioned discomfort and, sadly, [...]
In 1984, Russell Kirk penned an essay of almost prophetic accuracy, which soon thereafter appeared in the pages of Modern Age. This essay, The Age of Sentiments, suggests that the world was in transition between one age, the so-called “Age of Discussion”, and into another, one which Kirk labels “the Age of Sentiments.” As Kirk [...]
Corporate scandals over the last two decades, followed by the crash of the economy in 2008, have brought about widespread skepticism toward America’s corporate leaders. Almost daily there are calls for new legal and regulatory reforms directed at businesses, especially banks and investment firms. Some corporations have even begun to reassess their own business practices. [...]
Chesterton recognized that heart and hearth, work and worth, are all of a piece. Human flourishing is found in families, human wholeness in holiness. Civilization depends on faith—faith both in the transcendent horizon that many call God, but also faith in reason, and in the ability of human intelligence to grasp objective truth. by [...]
The crescendo of voices clamoring for disordered public ethics is a din rising to hellish decibels. We are witnessing a massive misuse of American law by “rights and entitlement ideologues” licentiously torqueing the trajectory of this country’s course towards an irrevocable downward spiral. Morally disordered organizations like GLAAD and 100 more besides, are springing up [...]
Chapter 4 in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House “And the two shall become one flesh.” You don’t hear that much anymore, and when you do it is written off as poetry. With the low regard for poetry these days that pretty much relegates it to something fit for a greeting card. When I [...]
Is it possible for a text to be conservative if it dwells upon the pleasures of drug use, celebrates (and deplores) hooligan violence, and shows us the deaths of a neglected baby, the extra-judicial execution of a rapist, and (among others) a twenty something’s squalid death following a stroke brought on by toxoplasmosis? Irvine Welsh’s [...]
I love midnight movies, the Golden Oldies; they are the silver-lining of insomnia. Recently I caught part of an old black-and-white movie—Pressure Point—of the days when African-Americans were still called Negroes. Sidney Poitier plays a black prison psychiatrist. At one point his white patron says something about not expecting a Negro to be a successful [...]
Oftentimes we need to be reminded that we are more than animals. The attachment modern society has to stoking the fires of primitive passions we share with the beasts (feast, fight, fornicate) is literally dehumanizing—it makes us less than we by nature are. This, of course, is the very essence of corruption and causes great [...]
In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis referred to himself as a type of dinosaur; a species of “Old Western man” that was about to go extinct in the mid-20th century. Today I had the extraordinary opportunity to spend some time watching a man who I fear might also be one of the [...]
A long-time colleague of mine used to say, rather often, “John, you are so hopeful.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Another colleague once told me that he had just seen the ultimate conservative bumper-sticker: “LOSING SLOWLY.” The wickedly funny Ambrose Bierce (in The Devil’s Dictionary) defines “pessimism” as “The philosophy forced upon the convictions [...]