John Profumo has died. You may not have heard of him. Few people have, especially in the United States. But for years he was a prominent British politician—Secretary of State for War during the early 1960s under Harold MacMillan. In 1963 it was discovered that Profumo had had marital relations with a prostitute who also [...]
Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves as its animating force. Some scholars have argued that American constitutionalism has evolved so far from its founding principles that political practice today would be unrecognizable by the eighteenth-century Framers. These critics submit that the [...]
Let’s get straight to the point. We no longer live in a culturally Christian state. We do not live in a robust pagan state, such as Rome was during the Pax Romana. We live in a sickly sub-pagan state, or metastate, a monstrous thing, all-meddlesome, all-ambitious. The natural virtues are scorned. Temperance is for prigs, [...]
“Certainly civilization cannot advance without freedom of inquiry. This fact is self-evident. What seems equally self-evident is that in the process of history certain immutable truths have been revealed and discovered and that their value is not subject to the limitations of time and space. The probing, the relentless debunking, has engendered a skepticism that [...]
Adam Smith is too often positioned as the godfather of “unfettered markets, libertarian governments, interactions solely for the purpose of satisfaction, and atomistic cosmopolitanism.” What has been lost is Smith’s “clarion call for personal relationships” as the basis for human society. Legend has it that at the age of four, Adam Smith was kidnapped from [...]
The Moral Foundations of Civil Society by Wilhelm Roepke, with a new introduction by William F. Campbell. The Social Crisis of Our Time by Wilhelm Roepke, with a foreword by Russell Kirk and an introduction by William F. Campbell. Without a vision the people perish. So says the writer of Proverbs. In both The Moral [...]
Thus says the Lord: Do not learn the ways of the nations, and have no fear of the signs of the heavens, even though the nations fear them. For the carvings of the nations are nonentities, wood cut from the forest, fashioned by artisans with the adze, adorned with silver and gold. With nails and [...]
Who loves employee codes of conduct? Given how sprawling and lawyerly many of them are, who can even read them? If you’re a boss who is thinking of scrapping yours and embracing one that reflects the values embodied in your company’s slogan, like Google’s “Don’t be evil” or Zappos’ “Be humble,” your employees will certainly [...]
Past weeks have seen a great deal of attention paid to now-disgraced NBC Anchor Brian Williams and the lies that brought him down from the heights of status and popularity. Apparently it did not occur to Mr. Williams, or to his early supporters, that an anchorman’s “irrelevant” lies about his wartime exploits are something more [...]
G.K. Chesterton remarked on insanity in Orthodoxy. He said “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that [...]
I grew up in a secular humanist home with highly “educated” parents who were very much the product of the modern age when it came to morality. My parents were good folks, and when I would ask for advice about a particular moral quandary, they would invariably tell me to “pick a course of action [...]
The cacophony of the modern public square often includes voices that employ rights rhetoric aimed at promoting licentious views, especially in regard to human sexuality. Those who dare to disagree with these advocates by promoting virtue instead of vice will likely have their livelihoods ruined, and consequently what little remains in America of the innocence, decency and common sense required [...]
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you. [...]
One of the most popular and enduring films, and fast on its way to becoming a timeless classic, features murder, nudity, adultery, savage violence, homosexual rape, and suicide. The movie is Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption. Based on a novella by Stephen King, the film recounts the story of uptight banker Andy Dufresne, who is locked [...]