Articles 356
From the Distant Liberal Consensus, a Defiant Conservative Yelp
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As I write this review, I keep hearing about Jeb Bush, campaigning for president, talking about how the invasion of Iraq and the removal of…
Bernie Sanders: Front Porch Socialist?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] This October, Front Porch Republic will host its annual conference in Geneseo, NY, just a short day's drive from Burlington, Vermont, the home current presidential…
From the Multiversity: Three Reformations
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
What Ronda Rousey Knows About Caitlyn Jenner
Hidden Springs Lane. Two of the biggest sports-related stories of this year include the dominance of UFC fighter Ronda Rousey and the introduction of Caitlyn Jenner to a world that…
From The Multiversity: The New Paradigm
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
Just Another Naked King
What hath Athens to do with Main Street? Why should an economic crisis in a small European nation shake up the world? And can this possibly add up to freedom?…
An Athenian Coup, or Slapstick Bedtime Story?
For tonight’s lesson, I said to my ten-year-old, tell me how the first democracy was created. “Sure,” she said, remembering our lessons past. “It was in Athens, about 2,500 years…
Kids These Days: Why We Shouldn’t Worry if They Don’t Leave Home Early
A popular version of the undying nostalgia for a golden era gone by is the view that this era was a time when men were men, and children grew into…
Visit to a Small Planet
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY -- As New Horizons races past Pluto this week, I offer this blast from the recent past, a tribute to the discoverer of the ninth planet (International…
Puritans and The Pope: The Conflicted Christian History of American Ecological Ethics
The responses from American Christians to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ have fallen into two predictable categories: Economic conservatives push back against Francis’ critique of “technoscience,” claiming that capitalism and…
30 More Years of Rootless Professors
In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and much hasn’t, regarding academe’s reputedly rootless…
The Incredible Industrial Egg
The local library’s inventory reduction sale had progressed over several weeks from a buck a book and a dollar a DVD, to two dollars a flat, and finally to a…
The Silly Season is Here Again
Elections are here, but manure-spreading is nothing new.
Harriet Tubman, in a Child’s Eye
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY - I’m overjoyed that the phiz of that bastard Alexander Hamilton, the father of corporate capitalism, will be removed from the $10 bill he has for so…
Palmyra, Centurions, and Fighting ISIS from the Bottom Up
The fact that the chattering classes outraged by ISIS’s atrocities would unleash the latter-day centurions of the air so eagerly, while leashing ordinary people so cavalierly, should give pause to…
The Cardinal and the Capitalist
A cleric with the ear of Pope Francis recently sent Catholic defenders of free markets into a tizzy. At a press conference, Cardinal Oscar Rodriquez Maradiaga of Honduras tossed out…
Comedians in Togas
The Greeks were funny. We don’t usually think of them that way; we think of them as marbled patriarchs in togas, Really Important Men We Revere for Some Reason. Admittedly,…
On Commencement Addresses
Holland, MI It is graduation season. On campuses across the country graduates will be subject to the last compulsory and least remarkable rite of passage: the commencement address. By my…
A Presidential Proposal Worthy of the Porch
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The blogger, pundit, screenwriter, and all-around mensch Noah Millman has come up with a brilliant idea--Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont, and Jim Webb, former…
Tom Fleming Retires
Rockford, Illinois. After thirty-one years at Chronicles Magazine—thirty of them as editor—classicist, poet and polemicist Tom Fleming has retired. During his tenure at this small but influential magazine of the…
Witchcraft in Church? Against Glamorous Worship
Recently, our local Trappist Monastery, the Abbey of the Genesee, unveiled a renovation of the sanctuary of the Abbey church. To the shock of some — those who often claim to…
The Soul of Facebook Venting: Empowered Alternatives to Ranting Online
In the old days, when you saw something in your morning newspaper that bothered you, you could vent your ballooning anger with a minute or two of hearty breakfast-table grumbling.…