Writers & Poets 232

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] To continue with the excellent discussion begun by R.J. Snell, Mark Mitchell's fine and thoughtful book is filled with important insights and challenges, which do…

Beyond the purple velvet drapes, the skeins of billowed gossamer, my hotel window looks down on the back gates of Trinity College. Up three floors and pierced by a late…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Rod Dreher's 2006 manifesto, Crunchy Cons, was an inspiration (and provocation) to many, on both the left and the right. It wasn't that the book…

Like dew on the gowan lying Is the fa’ o’ her fairy feet; Like winds in summer sighing, Her voice is low and sweet. Her voice is low and sweet,…

If you had told me, a happy and professionally satisfied D.C. lawyer living on Capitol Hill, just over a year ago, that I would be back someday soon living in…

Our dwelling place is the state not of nature but of culture.

A little over a year ago, after hearing my bitter protests about another pathetic talk by some expert on education whose vision of life I find basically revolting but whose…

Three articles recently caught my eye, all of which having to do with scholars' fame, only two having to do with their libraries. The bookless one involved a professor of…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The final sentence in Behind the Beautiful Forevers--Katherine Boo's wonderfully written, devastatingly detailed narrative of several fascinating, despairing stories that took place over the period…

“Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Last Friday, Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, principal author of 1962's Port Huron Statement (or, if you Big Lebowski fans…

News of the passing of Gene Genovese and Henry May took the wind out of these aging sails. In addition to reading these historians while in grad school almost thirty…

If a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, I took my prescription of limits and localism with a spoon full of pretty sweet sugar indeed.   About 20…

In 1940, when the Nazis attacked their supposed racial kinfolk in Norway and set up a puppet government under the odious Quisling, the novelist Sigrid Undset fled to the countryside…

Damn the lights, unnatural, bright, coiled, spewing white 15 watts.   Damn the halls, with their smooth vinyl, soaked in bleach, the stench of sterile rising like road kill on…

In his estimable history of distributism and its major figures, Jobs of Our Own, Australian economist and former MP Race Matthews records an account of the distinctive atmosphere of the…

I’ve breathed its dust in, taken careful note how plastic urns break in the snow; how I can merely mock at stone’s sad history; pronounce its fate, perhaps, but just…

On a gorgeous April Wednesday I am filling in as substitute homeschool teacher. We do arithmetic; we do a language lesson about adverbs and Emily Dickinson. Then—did I mention the…

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…

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…

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.

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:…

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…