Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 In philosophy, religion, politics, and other arenas of communal life, we are confronted with choices between radical contraries. We can choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche (according to Alasdair MacIntyre); we can choose between God and Mammon (as Jesus instructs in the Sermon on the Mount), or, as [...]
The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 by Alan Petigny The era usually denoted as “the Fifties” generated a remarkable set of social indicators. For the one hundred years prior to 1941, the American marriage rate was in decline. The proportion of the adult population that was married also fell steadily, while the divorce rate began a seemingly [...]
In 1941 the Prairie Farmer, America’s oldest farm periodical, celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The centennial cover features a drawing of the iconic twentieth-century “new” farmer: tall, young, and slender. Bulky overalls have given way to tailored city clothes; the straw hat to a fedora. In the artist’s words, he is “a strong, virile, keen, [...]
Wilhelm Röpke was an unusual free-market economist working in a difficult time. I believe that we should see him, first of all, as a product of 1914, the year which launched what he called “the devastation on so gigantic a scale to which mankind, then having gone mad, dedicated itself.” Mustered to war as a [...]
According to Kirk, those seeking a viable future “will endeavor to make the family function as a device for love and education and economic advantage, not simply an instrument of the feeding-and-housing-and-procreative process.” In his autobiographical The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk labels himself “a Northern Agrarian.”[1] The same label surfaces in ISI’s American Conservatism: [...]