Tag: Founding Fathers

A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review...

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, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.

Democracy’s Despotic Drift

A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian as this one, when doublethink routinely masquerades as rational thought.

How Shall We Train Up A Child?: The View From One...

All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Any curriculum and set of standards will base itself on certain ideas about the nature of the human person, how persons are shaped, and what kind of person society needs.

Reviving the Cult of Citizenship: Tony Woodlief’s I, Citizen

If you do follow Woodlief's advice, you'll need a thick skin and a dogged commitment to first principles. Self-government takes time and effort, and too many people really do want to leave the driving to the experts.

The Founding Gardeners

I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this...

Washington, we have a Problem

We have for so long asserted that we are a force for good in the world and that our efforts are in the service of "democracy" that we can no longer see the irony of a nation refusing to call itself an empire when in possession of military bases around the globe and expending nearly half our annual tax receipts on war efforts without foreseeable end.

Welcome to the Plutocracy

This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself.

When Lawyers Catch the French Disease

 Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped...