A little more than a year ago, I had the chance to talk with an extremely intelligent and talented scholar, one who had justly won a number of major awards. As we began to talk rather civilly over coffee and tea about our understandings of modern academia, this person said with some exasperation after I told [...]
A few years ago, I was witness to a lecture in which the lecturer claimed that those who voted against the Constitution in the ratification process should no longer be considered American. In other words, only those who supported the vote in favor of the Constitution by actually casting a vote are legitimate. Needless to [...]
Joy Davidman is such an unsympathetic figure that one must question the judgment and goodness of C.S. Lewis in choosing to marry her. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, ed. by Don W. King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009) I’ve spent the better part of my career as a historian and a [...]
Harry Earhart In the summer of 1998, I had a wonderful phone call, mostly by accident. The University of Texas-San Antonio needed a historian immediately. They actually called my wife to ask her, and we were in between our wedding and our honeymoon. Actually, it was the day—yes, I mean the actual day—immediately [...]
Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, was a virtuous man caught in a terrible spot. While his personal but generally private loyalties lay with the South, his duty as he saw it was to the United States government. In the early evening of December 26, 1860, at Fort Moultrie, Charleston, South Carolina, Captain [...]
Abraham Lincoln reflected the worst of northern excesses, South Carolinians believed. His election, one Charlestonian averred, “was simply a sign to us that we are in danger, and must provide for our own safety.” The finest of gentlemen founded South Carolina, informants assured the famous London Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, upon his arrival in [...]
James R. Otteson, the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics at Wake Forest University, possesses one of the greatest minds in defense of classical liberalism in the modern era. He has authored two definitive works on Adam Smith, a clear rebuttal of the ethics of Peter Singer, and now a crucial attack on [...]
By any objective standard, it would be difficult to claim that the Constitution really matters at any practical level in the United States. At a symbolic level, it still means a great deal. But, what a disconnect: that it matters so much in our minds and language but that it means nothing in our day-to-day [...]
C.S. Lewis’ best novel, That Hideous Strength (1945), is a story first and foremost about marriage. As Lewis properly understood it, marriage is our first and most important institution in resisting evil as well as the ever-looming and hovering chaos of our modern and post-modern whirligig we call "Western society." "Matrimony was ordained, thirdly," said [...]
The West will not contain communism; it will transcend communism. For two full minutes on May 17, 1981, the attendees of the graduation ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame offered President Ronald Reagan a standing ovation.[1] He entered the ACC—Notre Dame’s basketball and hockey arena—accompanied by priests, professors, and diplomats. Throughout his time on the [...]
"The Killing Fields" makes the horrors of communism palpable in ways even the greatest books can not. And it demonstrates rather conclusively that cinema as a medium can reach the level of the greatest art. In the late winter/early spring of 1985, I attended a showing of the most immersive and artful movie I had [...]
The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement, by Ulrich L. Lehner (Oxford University Press, 2016) The Catholic Enlightenment is a great book. Indeed, no recent academic work on Catholicism has raised my hopes this high for the current level of scholarship since first having encountered the writings of Christopher Dawson a decade and [...]
“The Republican Party, which achieved its greatest vigor in this century during the presidential terms of Ronald Reagan, now seems in the sere and yellow leaf.” – Russell Kirk, February 27, 1991, the day before President George Bush declared victory with Operation Desert Storm. Scholars Bradley J. Birzer and Adam Fuller reflect on Russell Kirk’s [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien’s love of the Anglo-Saxon language and culture is legendary among both Tolkien scholars and aficionados, as is his hatred of all things French. His biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, wrote that he suffered from “Gallophobia.”[1] His student and friend, George Sayer, commented that when Tolkien stayed with him and his wife, he very politely ate [...]