Articles 356

Dillon, MT Having a personal and professional interest in what people think history is for, I read The History Manifesto with great interest. Jo Guldi (Brown) and David Armitage (Harvard)…

Manchester, CT I am grudgingly accepting that you don’t choose the place; the place chooses you. I’ve moved around a lot during my time on the planet, first as luggage, then…

As he began making the early “exploratory” rounds, a smiling Mike Huckabee recently reminded Martha Raddatz on ABC’s political Sunday show This Week that in 2008 he had run a…

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,…

Hillsdale, Michigan. The Paris killings a few weeks ago have unleashed a number of reflections about Islam and its tendency toward violence. Robert Tracinski makes a point that I have…

Amid the current discussions of rapidly increasing student loan debt, the unaffordability of higher education, and the gap between our college graduates and the skills necessary for the jobs available,…

Efficiency is a false god.

A mainland Chinese student visited my office last week, asking for a letter of recommendation for his transfer to another university. It is hard to lose a student like this—enthusiastic…

Just over a year ago John Zmirak caused a stir with his Aleteia article “Illiberal Catholicism.” In it, Zmirak excoriated a fairly broad range of Catholic academics and commentators for, among other…

By now you’ve already forgotten last month’s most important celebrity cause, namely the embodiment of freedom of expression known as The Interview. Hollywood has too, of course. It's so 2014.…

A plea for pastors to remember their audience.

Philadelphia, PA R. J. Snell A slow thinker and slower writer—some might say the reverse—I’ve been chewing over the Christmas season for the past few days, a remembrance of things…

If you want to write worse than the average undergraduate male, consider philosophy.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife…

"[T]he city as World icon is being destroyed, not by being secularized (it was always secular at base with some sacral potencies shooting through it from every angle) but by…

A few years ago, Josh Lyman spoke at Harvard to a packed room of starstruck student politicos. It wasn’t the real Josh Lyman, of course, because he isn’t real: he…

Marian devotion remains stubbornly enduring.

The path out of childhood often feels like one of the moving walkways you see in airports; there is a single direction you are being pushed in, and you are…

What can Plato teach us about and in the modern multiversity?

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Would I read Charlie Hebdo? (Assuming I could read French, that is.) Would I want anyone in my family to read it? Would I want…

“Ben Carson: Political Phenomenon.”  That gushing headline, at CNN.com of all virtual places, was followed by a puff piece of epic proportions.  Of course, with a Horatio Alger worthy biography…

Holland MI Today, Christians will celebrate the birth of Christ. Commenters on these pages have in the past noted some tensions between the Porch’s localist themes and the universalist themes…

As I'm sitting in an office on K Street, emptied for Christmas, wondering how to introduce myself to you all, it occurs to me that I owe you an explanation. It…

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home -- "Intimations of Immortality," William Wordsworth As…