Civil War 8
That Brutal, Ferocious Thing: Watching Civil War
I must say that I did not want to write this review. I walked into the theatre with high hopes for Mr. Garland’s Civil War. I was hoping it would…
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…
Hard Times, Landscape, and Memory
The memory of pain has the power to protect our joy. The land, the place, the names, the people; these are what connect us to today and to every past…
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in…
The Most Polarized Era Ever?
In selecting reading material, the average reader might not immediately reach for a book about Congress in the nineteenth century. That would be a mistake, as Joanne Freeman’s book The…
Two Degrees of Separation
Henry County, Kentucky. Last week here we buried our 97-year-old neighbor, a woman named Thelma Chilton Moody Clark. Until this spring she had never been sick, “and I don't know…
With Malice Toward None (Well, Maybe Toward the Thought Police)
Check out this exceptionally fine speech http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-maxwell/on-the-occasion-of-presid_b_212674.html by film director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals), who refused to allow William ("inherited utility monopoly wealth means never having to say…
Abraham Lincoln and the Destruction of Place
In case you missed it, 2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier this week I participated in a roundtable discussion on Lincoln’s legacy sponsored by Messiah College and…