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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…
April 18, 2024

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…
October 3, 2022

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…
Katherine Dalton
September 17, 2009

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…
June 5, 2009

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…