The Stump

Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters

When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it...

Communal Self-Reliance: A Tie to Bind Black and White

Two recent incidents have made clear to me how the culture wars can stultify the fecund complexity of our common life. Recently, my wife...

Learning from The Left Behind

Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in...

The Practice of Attachment and A Comprehensive Social Order

Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla took to the pages of the New York Times to offer...

Good News and Bad News

As always, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. On the good side of the ledger, the facts seem incontrovertible: more and more people...

What is Liberty Anyway?

Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a manifesto in defense of place, limits, and liberty. And the amount of attention it’s received...

Letter from the Electronic Jail

From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.”  Fifty-five years later, our networks...

Urban Questions (and Responses) for Krugman

Over a month ago, Paul Krugman used his space at The New York Times to ask "what, in the modern economy, are small cities...

After Romney: Republican Soul-Searching

These remarks were delivered before the Notre Dame College Republicans at a panel devoted to discussing the future of the Republican Party.  As an independent,...