When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is. My answer is the one known by millions and millions: arrest, purge, gulag, and death. That’s communism. But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different [...]
So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore. The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is. The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [...]
Last November, the political science models that predict presidential-election winners broke. As has long been taught, no incumbent ever wins re-election after presiding over weak recovery from a steep recession and 1.5% yearly economic growth—namely President Obama’s record over his first term in office. So political scientists have to tend to their models. In the [...]
Schall on Chesterton by James V. Schall If G. K. Chesterton is persistently ignored by much of the contemporary intellectual world, he has, I think, no one to blame but himself. After all, he insisted he was nothing but a journalist who wrote for his time, and he did not give a hoot for posterity’s opinion [...]
As with Erasmus, I affirm that The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A’Kempis is the grandest of devotional reads. The devotional books that litter the bookstores, especially the local Christian bookstore are more shaped by the lowest common denominator of trivial therapeutic drivel, the “cutting edge” madness of the management class, or silly self-help books that know [...]
T.S. Eliot By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the [...]
Downton Abbey cast A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives. Some truth to that, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. [...]
Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for [...]
On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a concerted attack on Christianity and on the institution that the Church deems the fundamental cell of society, namely the family founded on the marriage of a man and a woman. In the US, Archbishop Chaput and other bishops have reacted strongly to the “contraception mandate”–the plans of the [...]
Americans, as brothers and descendants of Englishmen, were entitled to the rights inherited from the English through the development of Anglo-Saxon common law and through the several political battles. On the eve of the American Revolution, most American thinkers had embraced the idea of all rights (and, therefore, sovereignty) being inherited.[1] Americans, as brothers and [...]
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to clear the bar to justify pushing some other unread book aside. I am very glad, however, that [...]
How convenient. By the same token, of course, to say that a “good” message makes for good art is both foolish and dangerous. Just as the “art” of Socialist Realism, with its paintings of stylized scenes of heroism in the name of “the workers,” is both nasty, lying propaganda and schlock, so the various renderings of “The [...]
Arguments for Conservatism: A Political Philosophy by Roger Scruton. Conservatives always need to be on the look-out for new arguments to defend their positions, despite their conviction that there is “nothing new under the sun.” They may wish to live unreflectively by following the customs of their ancestors, but circumstances require that they also be vigilant [...]
Joseph Pearce Welcome to our new Senior Contributor, Joseph Pearce. Mr. Pearce is writer in residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire and the author of eighteen books. His works include: G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Innocence, Literary Converts, Tolkien: Man and Myth, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, The Quest for Shakespeare, Small [...]