History is full of surprises. One such surprise is the manner in which the secularist cataclysm of the French Revolution prompted a religious revival across the Channel in England. It was indeed ironic that the new spirit of absolute religious intolerance in France following that country’s Revolution of 1789 prompted a new spirit of relative [...]
A few weeks ago, as I was looking up my undergraduate advisor’s address, I was stunned to find that he’d passed away in September. Professor Walter T.K. Nugent was 86. He was a great teacher, a great scholar, and a great man. He equally inspired and intimidated me, and I’m deeply proud to count him [...]
One of the puzzles of human nature—call it evidence of original sin—is that when things are going well, the impulse to gratitude vanishes. To say that we owed this happy state of things to others would dim our glory and injure our pride. We might thank our admirers (of whom there are surely many), as [...]
(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day) I remember here by the fire, In the flickering reds and saffrons, They came in a ramshackle tub, Pilgrims in tall hats, Pilgrims of iron jaws, Drifting by weeks on beaten seas, And the random chapters say They were glad and sang to God. [...]
In a season of disharmony, discord, distrust, and disorder, it is often painful to stop, to pause, and to give oneself distance enough to consider what must be recognized as good, and true, and beautiful, even in what seems a cesspool of existence. To give thanks, though, is not only necessary, it is salubrious! In [...]
We know where, when, and how the famous song "America" ("My Country, 'Tis of Thee") came to be written. But what led Samuel Francis Smith, a young Baptist divinity student, to choose the words he did to go with the tune in front of him? Why was a person in training for Baptist ministry writing [...]
Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]
Always a liberal and never a leftist, historian Richard Hofstadter’s over-arching theme in explaining twentieth-century America was what he termed “status anxiety,” which seems to be an effort to explain too much with too little. Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz (1047 [...]
The Mayflower Compact is the first real assertion of the right to self-governance in the modern Western world and one of the most important in any time. On the first day of our spring semester, at the little liberal arts college at which I teach, I have for the last fourteen years had the joy [...]
A few weeks ago, I imagined which ten volumes I would select for my personal library were I to find myself locked up in a prison cell or perhaps washed up on a desert island. More recently, I offered a handful of poems for Halloween. Now, I have selected six paintings for the walls of [...]
What made Aaron Feuerstein famous was not success but his attitude in the face of catastrophe. When a fire destroyed the textile mill he owned, he faced the decisions of whether to rebuild and whether to continue to pay his 1,400 workers, who were left destitute in the dead of winter. His decision became a [...]
Valkyrie is a 2008 thriller film directed and co-produced by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander. The film is set in Nazi Germany during World War II and depicts the 20 July plot in 1944 by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and to use the Operation Valkyrie national emergency [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
The teaching of modern universities is that we inhabit a godless, indifferent, pointless material universe where consciousness itself is an accident. A prevailing nihilism settles out from this failure of questioning. If we reopen the essential questions, we can have faith that the truth will sustain us and reward us for our love of it. [...]