Articles 356

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" provides a springboard for reflecting on the problems of scientism, especially the temptation to self-deification and, what Eric Voegelin terms, modern Gnosticism.

In which Bill Kauffman bids a hopeful aloha to the American Imperium.

Or, "Can you hear me in the back? Why don't we all move in a little closer..." My latest column in the absolutely essential American Conservative: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-loneliness-of-the-long-dissonant-reader/.

If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.

Look around and you’ll see that the seeds planted by the New Left have not all fallen on hard ground. I think maybe they’re ready to flower.

Might Steinbrenner be to professional baseball what an agribusiness is to farming?

Today most symbols are gone, and gone with them is the sense of community cohesiveness that they used to communicate.

Though he had passionately opposed Hitler from the very beginning and had striven to protect the helpless from the SS, neither Americans nor English shed many tears for Moltke when…

If all groups were forced to comply with the anti-discrimination policies of the federal government, conceivably churches could not exclude unbelievers, wine clubs would have to be open to tee-totalers,…

Our conception of nature is too thin, too reliant upon the conceptions of the ancient Stoics, and so requires the more robust visions of Aristotle and Aquinas if moral debate…

The precincts of higher education have become so well known for their enormities and absurdities in the pursuit of political correctness that one may almost breeze past the latest episode…

A riff on Thomas Frank’s thesis in "What’s the Matter With Kansas?," asking why wealthy voters in Blue States like Connecticut have been apparently voting against their economic interests by…

Bryan Caplan ignores the role religious belief plays in fertility rates.

This leak at the bottom of the sea is a mirror held up to our uncomprehending selves.

Are suburbs random or a product of design?

I am going to try something largely inadvisable and possibly impossible, which is to explain the Court’s speech related First Amendment jurisprudence in accessible layman’s terms.

For Chesterton the birds of nature were always singing about the rightness of things and so softly correcting modern man’s unnatural despair of the created order and his egregious confidence…

Today many Americans seem smitten with the notion that Washington holds the answer to the many dangers circling in the water.

CLS vs. Martinez is part of a long-term effort to eviscerate all fundamental human associations. Only the radical individual and global state are regarded as legitimate.

No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his compound near Walden…

Whenever I hear someone claim that “our enemies hate us for our freedom,” I think first of the USS Vincennes and July 3rd, 1988. Twenty-two years ago today, Vincennes was…

The prevailing model of local voting has deep defects, which often work against strong communities. The modern standard is one person, one vote, one place. While this standard is simple,…

I prefer the waiter at Galatoire’s who told us to avoid the trout because it wasn’t very good that day. That’s useful information. But it’s simply impossible to imagine a…

This spring, Joel Salatin spoke at Patrick Henry College on "Food: The Cornerstone of Christian Credibility." I'm happy to be able to make an audio recording of this lecture available…