Though J.R.R. Tolkien arrived at Exeter College as a Classics (Great Books) scholar, he found his real passion resided in Germanic and Northern language and myth… Tolkien at Exeter College: How An Oxford Undergraduate Created Middle-earth by John Garth (66 pages, Exeter College, 2015) Never judge a book by its size. This little book is only [...]
One of the greatest causes of concern in American society by the 1820s was the perceived loss of virtue necessary to undergird a republic. All republicans knew that America would not last forever. They did, however, hope that by example, norms, education, and sacrifice, the American people would keep their republic alive as long as [...]
Nothing dominated the American conversation of the decade of the 1820s more than the idea of Andrew Jackson as president. The back-and-forth between the pro-Jackson and anti-Jackson forces is bewildering and dizzying even to the biographer who has the grand advantage of hindsight... The Great Depression of 1819 and the Missouri slavery question of the [...]
Andrew Jackson revealed his most republican self in his governorship. He not only continued Spanish civil and property law, thus ensuring that Spanish citizens would not be harmed, but he also extended English common law to Florida, especially in criminal matters… Though Andrew Jackson only served a very short term as governor of Florida, several [...]
To the end of his days, Andrew Jackson harbored suspicions about the United States employing a standing army. A standing army was a waste of a country’s resources, and even more so, a danger to the liberties of its people. To understand Andrew Jackson, his thought, his policies, and his legacy, one must understand the [...]
When Andrew Jackson learned that John C. Calhoun had been deceiving him for more than a decade, Jackson understandably exploded in rage. While Andrew Jackson was moving against the Seminoles, the Spanish, and the British in Florida in the late 1810s, he had assumed that his closest ally in President James Monroe’s cabinet was John [...]
When Andrew Jackson died in 1845, he had still not aligned himself officially with the Democratic party, still believing himself a natural and cultivated republican. Was he, then, an Old Republican? Despite being associated with the “Democratic Party,” then and now, it is unclear whether Andrew Jackson offered much thought about the Democratic Party or [...]
In almost every way, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Passage of the Marshes” presents a deeply frightening and suffocating experience for the reader, as the two Hobbits and the decrepit Gollum move across a landscape that has become devoid of grace… While nearly every decent human being under the age of sixty-five loves and appreciates J.R.R. Tolkien’s [...]
Jerry Ewing’s greatest achievements in Wonderous Stories are to show conclusively that progressive rock never died and continues to thrive; and that it’s a vital and vibrant cultural expression, worthy of all due scholarly and cultural attention… Wonderous Stories: A Journey Through the Landscape of Progressive Rock by Jerry Ewing (167 pages, Flood Gallery Publishing, 2018) [...]
For Father Tom, everything was larger in life, because he could see past our weaknesses and our failings. For Father Tom saw what God made a person to be, not what the person did stupidly with his own free will. When Father Tom looked at us, when he smiled at us, he did so with [...]
If James Madison offered the American republic a five-course meal of epicurean excellence, Roger Sherman was the short-order fry cook in the nearest greasy spoon, a block or two away from Independence Square. The Collected Works of Roger Sherman ed. Mark David Hall (840 pages, Liberty Fund, 2016) “Sherman’s air is the reverse of grace; there [...]
As if to create the cruelest irony possible, as the terrorist ideologies arose, Americans surrendered their own republican inheritance, their own Augustinian and Puritan caution, and their traditionally humane morality to the new god: “Progress.” It was nothing less than a new faith… When did it all go wrong? As Christopher Dawson used to note [...]
Our heritage of foreign intervention is a new one, an innovation introduced by the progressives. To imagine a clean and humane progressivism is, simply, a fool’s errand. Just how much imperialism is in the DNA—so to write—of the American character? When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American [...]
As revolutionary as they claimed to be, the French Revolutionaries were as old as sin, Edmund Burke assured his readers. “Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences,” he argued, and “you can find nothing at all that is new.” Roughly four-fifths into his spectacular Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke paused. [...]