The roaring success of the English television drama Downton Abbey had little to do with the grand house, the sumptuous costumes, the superb cast and intricately intriguing storyline. Having just finished watching the final season, it occurred to me that the series’s success has everything to do with fairytales. […]
In her roles as mother, teacher, and poet, Anne Bradstreet emerged as a chief voice of a remarkable generation that exercised lasting influence over the American colonies and later over the American Republic. In June 1630, an eighteen-year-old woman aboard a ship called the Arbella listened with her shipmates to a series of sermons by [...]
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve. “Dangerous,” “toxic,” came the recoil from the media. Mr. Trump is threatening to “delegitimize” the election results of 2016. Well, if that is what Mr. Trump is trying to do, he [...]
St. George’s Day, the feast day of England’s patron saint, is Shakespeare’s birthday and, believe it or not, is also the day on which Shakespeare died. Apart from the astonishing coincidence that Shakespeare died on his own birthday, it is also singularly appropriate that England’s greatest poet should have been born and should have died [...]
Starship Troopers is perhaps the best-known novel of science fiction master Robert A. Heinlein. Unlike many science fiction novels, the longevity of Starship Troopers’ reputation has at least as much to do with controversies over its themes as the quality of the writing and storytelling. I am afraid there is no getting around using the [...]
Modern technological innovation has made globalization possible. And globalization’s new social reality is unparalleled in history. Accordingly, it presents politics with new challenges. But it also presents politics with unprecedented technological power to deal with these new challenges. However, the power of these technologies is ambiguous, since they can create two types of experiences: “hot” [...]
The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, was asked to give a list of books he’s reading. As the Los Angeles Times notes, the fact that he couldn’t name the titles suggests that the question caught him off guard. He did give a little information about the books, however: "I'm reading the Ed Klein book on Hillary [...]
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable [...]
I was reminded recently of the ongoing debate over the nature of democracy. The occasion was my rereading of Claes Ryn’s Democracy and the Ethical Life. In this classic work Prof. Ryn criticizes those who insist that democracy is merely a means for discerning the will of the people. This view, he argues, leads naturally to the [...]
The problem is not whether black lives matter in an unequivocal, objective sense—of course they do—but in the fact that certain black lives don’t seem to matter to some people. Having asked such a provocative question, I’m going to answer it unequivocally. Yes, of course all black lives matter. They matter not because they are [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Glenn Arbery as he contemplates the importance of poetry to a well-formed soul. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Last year when Dr. Kevin Roberts and I first met with the senior class in a course we were co-teaching, Dr. Roberts asked what [...]
In my adult life, I have never witnessed such a randomly violent spring and summer as we have had this year: priests murdered while saying Mass; Turkish troops surrounding U.S. military bases; police being executed while on duty; police reacting to stresses (too often poorly) beyond the imagination of most of us; trucks driving through [...]
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I [...]
The unity inherent in the good, the beautiful, and the true inevitably brings literature into contact with issues properly political: the pursuit of the good; man’s social nature; the patterns apparent in our public life, including actions and their consequences; the moral significance of choices; the inescapability of responsibility; the wisdom and folly of our [...]