President Trump has an uncanny knack for energizing his supporters and riling his adversaries, but to have a lasting positive impact on American society he will need to find a way to inspire a majority of the American people... Like most first-time visitors, I rambled as if in a trance through the temple complex at [...]
Did the speech made by Pope John Paul II at Drogheda during his visit to Ireland in 1979 change the course of Irish history? This is the contention of a new documentary John Paul II in Ireland: A Plea for Peace, written and directed by David Naglieri. The originality of the film’s premise lies in [...]
Jim Wallis is an intelligent and sincere person, someone worth listening to on serious subjects. But he appears to be politically illiterate. There is simply no engagement with serious conservative political writers—no hint that he knows such people even exist. This is typical of many intelligent and well-informed people on the Left... One of my [...]
This confused climate of massive global networks arrayed against isolated individuals favors the appearance of vague terms like nationalism and populism. People reason that if global networks and selfish, false elites are destroying the nation, they must naturally step back and restore the nation-state to its rightful place in the hearts and minds of citizens... [...]
My concern was that once the shutdown began, it would be difficult to end it just as it is difficult to prevent a needless bloodbath once blood begins to spill. What most of the public—including most of my former colleagues in government service—don’t seem to understand is that this shutdown is unlike all those that [...]
The Enlightenment, that is modern reason, failed us in part, Hegel shows, both for the history it left behind and the legacy it bequeathed us. Indeed it brought us and spirit to the point of self-destruction. Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s College, Annapolis, in [...]
It is not about right and left but about right and wrong, and those who see politics in terms of right and wrong, and not in terms of right and left, will see parallels between the contempt of the anti-Semite towards the dignity of the human person and the contempt of the pro-abortionist towards the [...]
Latent in the seeds of all social movements, Charles Péguy asserted, are invariably good intentions: altruism, the common good, solidarity, or perhaps the search for truth. Why, then, must they all end in politics? One of the most influential public intellectuals of the French belle époque, Charles Péguy, had every reason to be weary of [...]
Rupert Murdoch In August of last year, I published my observations under the header “FoxNews Moving Leftward” about what we can now call the “maturing” of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.[1] Even earlier, on January 27, 2017, I observed that “the octogenarian Rupert Murdoch and sons, Lachlan and James, have achieved a balance of authority [...]
The Great War, in Woodrow Wilson’s view, had to become precisely what the delegates to the Congress of Vienna feared: a moral crusade, an instrument of social and political revolution. For American president Woodrow Wilson, the First World War was the “war to end all wars” by making “the world safe for democracy,” not least [...]
President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, if it holds, is one of the few genuinely courageous acts of his presidency… My first thought when I heard that President Trump was finally taking our troops out of the quagmire called Syria was that he was not really serious. Given how frequently and unpredictably [...]
Heather Mac Donald has written a no-holds-barred attack on the modern American university, where the absence of courage is only the tip of a very large and menacing iceberg… The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture by Heather Mac Donald (288 pages, St. Martin’s Press, 2018) This is [...]
Granted that the right to religious freedom is founded in the dignity of the human person, on what does the dignity of the human person itself finally rest, and how does one’s conception of these foundations affect the nature of the right? Can one assert a civil right to religious freedom without thereby at least [...]
Speaking personally, I’d rather discuss many things during this joyful season of Advent than “capitalism.” And yet Matthew Summers’ recent essay “In Defense of Capitalism” for The Imaginative Conservative has prompted me to comment on the topic, albeit briefly. […]