Quite often, when leading a college class studying a great poem, I begin by reading it aloud. When I finish reading it, instead of beginning comment and discussion, I read it again, perhaps even a third time. Among other effects, this concentrates the student’s mind on the object, which is the subject. Commentary is ontologically [...]
Here’s the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. This is a thought experiment, and you’re perfectly free to disagree with it, have contempt for it, or just hate it. Walker Percy’s self-help book is basically in the form of a twenty-question self-help quiz. The questions are about various self-understandings people have. [...]
The Smart Take from the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril by Pete Carril Bad shooters are always open.–Pete Carril Dr. Pete Carril is a bit of a snob. I emphasize the “Dr.” because last year Princeton, the school at which he coached basketball for twenty-nine years, awarded him the honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities. I [...]
The cynicism of modern-day youth presents us with a great teachable moment. We must tell history as a great myth, for myths are often the best way of expressing truths. They are also the lifeblood of civilizations. “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into [...]
Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that [...]
It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth—a rising, thriving middle class. So said Barack Obama in his State of the Union. And for one of his ideas to reignite that engine, Republicans applauded. “And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic [...]
“Any damn fool can pull a strike. It takes commonsense to avert one.”–Joseph Frederick “As in other warfare, victory in a strike is to the strong, not the just; and often noncombatants suffer most.”–W. H. Hutt Strike One When a strike happens, almost everyone loses, whether businesses, or consumers, or workers. […]
“If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule of the mob. For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob is a body of a thousand men in which [...]
Eric Voegelin Nearly two decades ago there appeared the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s exemplary quest for a theoretically intelligible order of history (Vol. I, Israel and Revelation; Vol. II, The World of the Polis; Vol. III, Plato and Aristotle). The plan projected three more volumes: Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis [...]
Years ago, while I was teaching at a left-wing liberal arts college (one of those places where the students wear black to show how depressing it is to be young and well off) a colleague bragged to me about a study he had done on how to keep convicted criminals from returning to a life of [...]
by Stephen Masty A 1960s/1970s comedian from before entertainment was invented, Rodney Dangerfield, had a catch-phrase complaining “I don’t get no respect.” American conservatives, outside of their own small communities, could make the same gripe. Until now. According to industrial leaks, Google, the cutting-edge IT company, is already designing a second-generation of its highly-anticipated Google [...]
My topic is a theological appreciation of the notion of “gift”, and how this throws light on what something is, which to our usual way of thinking would seem to be a matter for philosophy or science rather than theology. The sense of being as “gift” and ourselves as primarily “receivers” of this gift of existence, which carries [...]
Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years, Articles From 1974 to 1991, edited by Fran Griffin These are the times that try men’s scruples, especially the scruples of reviewers. Fact A: I knew Joe Sobran, from 2003 to 2008, well enough to sabotage such hopes of critical detachment as I might otherwise have retained concerning his [...]
At the risk of seeming too parochial, I want to outline the dimensions of a problem that has been of special concern for me and other conservative students of the American political tradition, broadly defined. This concern is not as narrow as it may at first seem. Nor, by any standard, is it insignificant; it [...]