Articles 356

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…

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 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?…

I am the illegitimate son of Dorothy Day and H.D. Thoreau.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Elections are here, but manure-spreading is nothing new.

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

[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…

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…

Earth's the right place for love.

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…

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.…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A few weeks ago I was able to, once again, do something that I enjoy doing immensely--take a group of students out on a local…

Trees cannot talk, but they do speak. With our eyes focused on franticly flickering screens, perhaps our ears have grown dull to their still small voices, yet they whisper on.…

Modern persons have a problem with limits, three in fact. They want every good thing to be unlimitedly available for their desires, and scarcity is taken for a cause of…