With the exception of a few figures like Professor Peter Augustine Lawler, who is a self-identified “postmodern conservative,” conservatives are generally suspicious of the word “postmodern.” I think this aversion is uncalled for, and that the interests of a broadly-understood postmodernity align with many of conservatism’s central tenets. Critics such as William Lane Craig have [...]
Tensions tighten and raucous roars of excitement permeate America as football fans eagerly await this year’s Super Bowl. Fans have watched the playoffs intrigued as games unfold, awaiting the final score to see which team will advance to the final game. Some scorn the passion and obsession people have with a “trivial” game. And in [...]
It is hard not to think of ourselves as the users of technology, especially since technology forms a core part of the image of our freedom. Liberty and freedom are things that we have. Depending what definition we use, liberty describes a natural faculty to do what we want, denotes the absence of external impediments, [...]
“He [the new priest] also kept it differently, scouring away the blood after each slaughter and sprinkling fresh water; it smelled cleaner and less holy.” —C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces They say cleanliness is next to godliness. They, as “they” usually are, are wrong. G.K. Chesterton reminds us that saints can afford to [...]
In a recent essay, Mark Shiffman notes that in the fiercely competitive but nonetheless gloomy context in which university students find themselves, many opt to “major in fear.” Fear that they will not find work or pay off student loans. Fear of lost opportunities or moving home with mom and dad. Consequently, Mr. Shiffman states, [...]
Cokie Roberts, a celebrated radio and television commentator, once participated in a discussion concerning congressional term limits and commented on American solidarity (or the lack thereof). She stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created.” This is a curious [...]
It was eleven years after the Declaration of Independence—and four years after American victory in the Revolutionary War—that a small group of delegates would convene in Philadelphia to create a new charter for governing the new nation. In order to comprehend this historic achievement we must first understand that this moment and the constitutional document [...]
Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a self-proclaimed “Progressive,” many American conservative intellectuals have become convinced that resistance to Progressivism is the essence of their cause. They believe the American political tradition, flowing from the philosopher John Locke, is grounded in the immutable “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and preeminently in the [...]
Over the past half century, conservatism has become the dominant political philosophy in the United States. Newspaper and television political news stories more often than not will mention the word conservative. Almost every Republican running for office—whether for school board or U.S. senator—will try to establish his place on the political spectrum based on how [...]
Over the years I have gotten into trouble more than a few times for things I have written or said in public, but I suppose the chief cause of my notoriety is a speech I gave to the freshmen of Yale College suggesting that they would be wise to make the study of Western civilization [...]
The historiography of American conservatism (often rendered the “conservative movement”) remains immature. For decades, the academic historical establishment largely ignored American conservatives or dealt with them as a sort of fringe group, recurrent expressions of a pathology. Only after the surprising and enduring appeal of Ronald Reagan did most historians begin to take serious scholarly [...]
It is a mistake, I think, to look at Whit Stillman as an apologist for what one of his characters in Metropolitan wanted to call the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHB. Apart from anything else, it is far from clear whether any such thing actually exists in nature in the form proposed by the term’s [...]
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly The authors of this latest attempt to give life “meaning” and to “uncover the wonder” of the world—concealed, as it has been, by modern technological culture—begin their argument with an episode. In 2007, a young [...]
George Orwell’s delightful, brief narrative acts as a fable: its animal characters allow us to see afresh well-worn and conventional truths. The fable warns us of what we already know, but must learn again and again if we are not to be fooled into historical optimism. By the time George Orwell’s Animal Farm appeared in August [...]