If Neil Gaiman had a Klout score, he might just break a hundred. But then maybe Neil Gaiman does have a Klout score. He seems to be everywhere else on the Internet these days. As, for example, in “A Beginner’s Guide to: Neil Gaiman” a feature in this week’s Time magazine. (For those who haven’t [...]
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened. Fast forward to our [...]
I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21st, produced no great epic poems. I have yet to receive an answer, any answer. After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will. So here, in desperation, I do what I seldom do: I give them the answer they never [...]
Incarnational Humanism, by Jens Zimerman This work is thoroughly grounded in Christian theology and biblical reflection. At the very heart of Zimmerman's case is the incarnation of Christ. Possibly the most explicit assertion defended throughout the book is “True humanity is the heart of the Gospel and the goal of Christ's redemptive work…” This is [...]
Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot (ed., published as Eliot and His Age). The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the whole [...]
The current issue of HUMANUM, the freely available online journal of the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC (from the Institute’s Center for Pastoral and Cultural Research) is devoted to the crisis of fatherhood in our culture. It contains articles and book reviews devoted to the literature [...]
Albert Speer’s career is a microcosm of the decent (but philosophically agnostic) citizen living in an indecent (and ideologically fanatical) society. Speer served as Hitler’s chief architect, and during the Second World War was Germany’s minister of armaments. As such, Speer was a leading technocrat in a totalitarian state. While 21st century America is a [...]
A question has haunted the aftermath of the Great Recession: where is all the inflation? If the Federal Reserve is going to spike the money supply most massively in the context of minimal economic growth, as it has since 2008, it would seem that a severe price inflation must ensue. Yet the consumer price index [...]
The thousandth anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066 AD, is still a few decades away and most people know the related story of food and the cultural differences. Our modern English words for domestic animals tend to be the names used by the lowly Saxon farmer-folk who raised them, while once the [...]
To the National Executive Board, the Boy Scouts of America Dear Friends, For as long as I can remember I have loved the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). I was fundamentally shaped by the decade I spent as a Scout. Many of my closest friends and my younger brother were fellow Scouts. My father, who [...]
“The worst lies,” declared the French writer Georges Bernanos, “are problems wrongly stated.“ How applicable that observation is to so many concerns at present, not least the tragic events that took place in Boston. The chatter that fills the airwaves with speculation about the ideology that motivated two young men to detonate bombs on a [...]
A good friend of mine and a man I respect immensely, Hunter Baker, warned me to finish Isaacson’s long biography of Steve Jobs before passing too much judgment on the life and personality of the technology genius. Another close friend (a fellow Apple fanatic going back to the 1980s when we were debate colleagues and [...]
For those of us blessed enough to have visited Russell Kirk’s Piety Hill, we already know what charms have settled over the place, become one with the surrounding woods, the architecture, and the very home itself. Annette Kirk, that uncontainable force of nature, is, of course, the perfect hostess. And, who would not be enthralled [...]
The news headlines remain depressing, of course. Innocents have been killed and maimed in Boston through an act of spiteful hatred. Revelations of the chillingly casual killing of innocents in a Philadelphia abortion clinic continue to seep into our ideologically anesthetized and unapologetic mainstream press. The Affordable Care Act wheezes toward completion for itself, and for [...]