The Nightstand
Contemplation in Action: Booth Tarkington and the Art of Business
Tarkington hopes that more Americans will choose to trek that path of fruitful tension in this fragmented world, however difficult it may prove.
More Articles in The Nightstand
Putting the Demos on a Pedestal
Why Liberalism Failed was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way…
Spider-Man Has Lost His Place
Spider-Man now devalues human-scale kindness and decency by questing in the multiverse, and ideological rigidity and swift judgment have replaced his former nuance and virtue-seeking.
A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review of The Nation that Never Was
After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded,…
Observing Limits to Re-enchant a Mute World: A Review of The Uncontrollability of the World
Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.
Antonin Scalia: A Man for All Seasons
Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Get Off the Bench: Host a Cocktail Party
As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is easy to…
Good Conversation and the Talking Cure: A Review
One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit must be…
A Journey to Right Worship: A Review of Learning to Love
I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of knowledge and…
Prophetic History: A Review of A History of the Island
Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy, or compassionate…
On Milosz, Exile, and Humane Art
Was it his commitment to truth in art that ultimately preserved his faith? Perhaps—God may have worked in that mysterious way. He seemed, late in life, to come to an acceptance, a…
Bono’s Search for Home
To hear that message of tough love for which he seems to be yearning, those who represent the church to Bono will have to have the courage to break through the aura…
A Plunge into the Mythic Wood: A Review of Seren of the Wildwood
Here is what Seren of the Wildwood has done for me: it’s rekindled my love of narrative poetry. Once I have read several of my old favourites, I’ll read it again, and…
Load More