Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today… Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace… – John Lennon (Imagine) [...]
Defining the essential attributes of being an “American” is a dangerous undertaking. Although I’m hardly a member of a marginalized minority, it wasn’t too long ago that my Irish ancestors were considered by many to be not-quite-American by virtue of their Celtic heritage (and often their Catholic faith). Faced with a nation not only comprised [...]
Does God underwrite our freedom, or undermine it? There are thousands of self-styled “libertarians” who would argue the latter. They actively oppose the religious commitments of most social conservatives, many of them convinced that materialism is the best metaphysical home for what we might call “libertarian values”—individual rights, freedom and personal responsibility, reason, and moral [...]
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only [...]
Jennifer Welter is pretty yoked up for a chick. Evidently, she is very committed to a rigorous work out program. Surely one could not be blamed for wondering what means of strength training she’s employed to get where she’s at: men’s professional football. Although her train wreck of a debut performance was impressive in a [...]
Most Americans today, as has been the case for the past 150 years or so, are neither economically nor politically free. They are, instead, servile, prime subjects for abuse and manipulation, because most depend on a wage or a salary. Americans have long mistrusted great power, which they regard as the enemy of freedom. They [...]
When the Word of God loses not only its sharpness but its ability to discern between truth and error, the eternal and the temporal, the essential and the constructed, it loses as well its ability to speak prophetically to a culture that has lost its way. If Bible-believing Christians are to take back marriage, they [...]
I want my gadgets to work. I want the planes to fly on time. I want the electricity and internet to work. I want to use my useful things. I want to utilize my utilities, and who does not? Everyone values the efficient, effective, and economical solutions, and so it should be. For everyday problems [...]
There are two ways to propose amendments to the Constitution: by a supermajority vote of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, or by a convention called by at least two-thirds of the state legislatures. The second option is not, strictly speaking, a constitutional convention, but a convention for proposing amendments to the [...]
The Introduction to, The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House There were giants in the land in those days, but fewer people than there used to be. Now the giants were the typical sort—lumbering and hungry. But the people were very odd, most anyway. It wasn’t uncommon for a giant to reach right into [...]
Tourism, as anyone with a passport can tell you, has become a very big business, particularly in places that no longer thrive in the customary practices of industry and commerce. Take Genoa, for instance, one of Europe’s largest cities along the Mediterranean coast and still the grandest seaport in all Italy, whose bright and shiny brochures [...]
Constitutional Government and Democracy by Carl J. Friedrich (Little, Brown and co. 1941) Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do by Cass R. Sunstein What a difference a few decades can make—even or perhaps especially among “progressives” at Harvard. A useful case in point is provided by one of the current “demigods,” Cass Sunstein, who seems to infest every aspect [...]
Years ago, I went twice to the snake-handling Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia—about twenty miles from where I live. It wasn’t my unbounded personal curiosity that led me to that church the first time. I went with a group of Christian sociologists who were meeting at Berry College, where I teach. [...]
State constitutions say quite a bit about the foundations of American rights. Oftentimes when thinking of rights and duties it is the United States Constitution that comes to mind. But state constitutions deal with the rights of the people as well, and in many ways are a much better gauge of how the American constitutional [...]