Articles Archive
Abstraction Rightly Understood
Part III in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Read Part I, and Part II. Berwyn, PA. In the last installment of this series, I contended that an…
Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design)…
Modesty’s Retreat
Over a drink with a fellow Canadian ex-pat about a month ago, I rather wistfully (and irresponsibly) indulged in some wishful thinking as I expressed my longing for the solid…
The Twenty Seven
Marbledale, Ct. I was travelling back from a meeting in the Hudson Valley when the news of the Newtown Rampage reached me. The shell-shocked radio disc jockey tearfully announced the terrible…
Scurrying toward Philly?
I have been engaged in a minor dust-up with my good friend Conor Dugan over reports that Notre Dame's Brian Kelly has been entertaining talks with the Philadelphia Eagles concerning…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and the Ground on Which Communities Are Built
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The final sentence in Behind the Beautiful Forevers--Katherine Boo's wonderfully written, devastatingly detailed narrative of several fascinating, despairing stories that took place over the period…
Where Will You Die?
Hidden Spring Lane. “I plan on dying here.” The words came quite unbidden and surprised me. We were in the process of building a house on a few acres in…
Ken Myers Profiled by Andrew Ferguson
Andrew Ferguson has a very nice profile of Ken Myers, editor of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, in the most recent Weekly Standard. The interviews and commentary featured on Myers's…
From Culture to Party Wars?
Among the various postmortem evaluations of the November election, R. R. Reno's at First Things ("The New Secular Moral Majority," December 2012) caught my eye: The Democratic party is very…
Life Under Compulsion: Bad Universality
I had not thought that the tsars of education could possibly have come up with another idea as inhuman or stupid as have been their many innovations in the past…
The Pickup Truck and the Tommy Gun
During the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich joked that “you can’t put a gun rack on [Chevy] Volt.” Newt was, of course, trying to identify himself with a rural culture while…
Centralization and the Fiscal Cliff
The Gray Lady weighs in today on the so-called "fiscal cliff," correctly pointing out that even if a deal is reached, like the one on the "debt ceiling crisis" before…
Where was God?
Hidden Springs, VA. In the days following the horrific events in Newtown, a theological debate has arisen, a debate that goes well beyond theoretical musings and gets to the heart…
Of “That Great Furnace, the Heart of Dickens”
A perennial question in this season: which version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol to watch? Somehow I can’t seem to muster much interest in any of them but one. After viewing…
The Culture of Guns? What About the Culture of Narcissism?
It is predictably American for Americans to obsess over an object used to perpetuate a crime, rather than examine the perpetrator and consider the people surrounding the perpetrator. The massacre…
NRA Proposes More Policemen
In a speech today, NRA president Wayne LaPierre called for a new initiative to place policemen in every school in America. It's curious that in attempting to defend one right,…
Continuing to Argue Against Abortion
“Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary…
Do Conservatives Need to Belong to A Minority to Get an Academic Job?
Jonathan Zimmerman thinks the answer is yes (thanks to John Fea): At Columbia University, 650 employees wrote checks for the Obama campaign, while only 21 made donations to Mitt Romney.…
Life Under Compulsion: Curricular Mire
In my last essay, I took issue with the inescapable computer, that costly thing on the student’s desk in “good” schools, inducing the itch for instant “information” at the expense…
Excluding Religion from Public Life is Tricky
Protestant conservatives of the Religious Right variety may be surprised to know that the strongest arguments for undressing the public square (of religious garments) came from Protestants. Whenever Roman Catholics…
Do You Have to be Old to be Conservative?
Most readers know the line (attributed to Winston Churchill, I believe), if you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. And if you are still a liberal at…
The New Domesticity
This is a highly confused article on the turn, particularly among women, to forms of "new domesticity." Its author, Emily Matchar, appears eager to deny that there is anything good to…
Is America Too Big?
Is the United States dysfunctionally large, and thus destined to go the way of the giant radioactive ants once seen in old sci-fi movies? That’s the question raised by this video…
Social Science and Human Liberty
At about the same moment I was reading David Brooks's third "Social Science Palooza," which is a summary of some recent, interesting findings in the study of human behavior, I…