Articles 356

Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism has long been vulnerable to attack by unsympathetic critics. Given that Jefferson ultimately banks on virtue rather than folly, this is of course to be expected; but…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Twenty-five years ago today (I think; my memory is far from perfect) I graduated from Central Valley High School in Spokane Valley (then "Veradale"), WA.…

In the spring of 1994 my grandmother chose to go off dialysis. Four days later, she was dead. I still remember my parents waking me up in the middle of…

Of all the downsides attendant to turning fifty, none annoys quite so much as receiving membership offers from the AARP. The junk mail invites a response to the effect that…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A few weeks ago I was visited by a fellow Wichita resident who was thinking about getting into politics. We talked for a while about…

Finding myself 2000 miles from Montana but with a couple of boys who want to go fishing, we ventured into the brown waters of the Shenandoah River. This is, according…

Harrison County, Ohio. After I first moved to Harrison County, my smaller children used to beg that we drive home after excursions via a little-used road that passes through a…

Guess what's for dinner.

They make their measured circuit along three blocks of neon fast-food chains, the darkened panes of auto dealerships, the Checks-Cashed, and the boarded Dollar Store.

Spring grades are in, so it’s time for a bit of fiction. And since I’ve been hearing plenty of buzz about The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (now a major…

Given my background, beliefs, and practices, I should be an enthusiastic supporter of the religious right—but I can’t do it. I’m religious. I’m conservative. I conclude with the religious right…

Devon, PA.  DePaul University in Chicago has many distinguished qualities.  Most striking among them would seem to be that it is nominally a Catholic university, and yet not only are most…

I came to Cairo to get a better sense of the prospects for such a global conversation. If the battle over values is likely to play out globally in this…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] This academic year Friends University found itself wondering what to do with a plot of land, directly beside and behind some student dormitories. Through a…

My review of Robert Nisbet's classic The Quest for Community was just published at the On-Line Library of Law and Liberty, whose stated purpose is "to bring together high-caliber conservative…

Just a few days back, I arrived home to find a mound of muddy clothes at my front entrance and the sounds of children scampering from bath to bedroom (all…

But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”

D. G. Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). ISB: 978-0-8028-6628-8. 252 Pages. Cost:…

The Yoke of Nature and Human Vocation.  When it comes to marriage and the having of children we experience these gifts, burdens, and yokes in ways few other aspects of…

Contraception as Apparent Moral Good.  Most persons who use contraception conceive of it as a moral good.  They see an unruly, pullulating nature directed toward nothing other than its own…

I make available, below, the text of a lecture I delivered in November, 2011, at University of Texas at Austin. My thanks to the Jefferson Center and Tom and Lorraine…

While April first brought April Fools’ Day with all of its jokes and gags, the foolish part of the first of April was not its primary value for me.  It…

In the spring of 2011, articles began popping up about a couple in Toronto who were refusing to publicly reveal the gender of their baby. They named the child “Storm”…

“Many propositions involving temporal concepts which seem obviously and necessarily true are just as necessarily but not obviously true when formulated in terms of spatial relations.” [1] In 2011, the…