A guide to the paths that remain open when “tradition falls out of existence.” The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened the tradition of a society can be restored only by a creative and even radical reconstruction of the tradition itself. The problem to which [...]
There is a cartoon that has, as they say, “gone viral” on the internet in the last two weeks or so. It’s one of the oldest threads from the Schultz empire, and one never tires of its utterly predictable and utterly funny ending. Lucy the capitalist progressive always wins, and Charlie Brown never learns. Here [...]
Patricia Christine Jellicoe Christmastime is fast upon us, and for many Americans it is an opportunity for spirituality and merriment, family, tradition and fret. Especially fret. No sooner have Black Friday and Cyber Monday unleashed their discounts, no sooner have what John Willson calls the “walmartians” beamed down to smite one another over [...]
“Nobody can make a tradition,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote; “it takes a century to make it.” There are American traditions, because there have been three centuries of American history; yet this is a brief period of time, when one remembers that some of the traditions of Europe and Asia and Africa have their roots in a [...]