Tag: gratitude
Ingratitude and the Death of Freedom
The hubris of ingratitude is a caustic acid that reduces all in its wake to the fetid condition of servitude, for a spoiled child needs nothing so much as a master.
A Tale of Two Banks
He discovered that he could solve the dependence on loan sharks in one village with a mere $27 in capital. For a man who was used to working in millions and billions, this was a real revelation
The Vast White Landscape: E.B. White’s “Great Snows” Revisited
Rock Island, IL
A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to...
Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation
Kearneysville, WV. When speaking of the proper care for the natural world, the word that best describes our efforts is stewardship. Stewards are care-takers....
Teenagers, Gratitude, and a Culture of Affluence
Holland, MI. Like many readers, or perhaps more accurately, like many readers with children, I read with great interest Mark Mitchell’s piece on “Cultivating...
Cultivating Gratitude
Blairsville, GA. Recently I was with a friend whose oldest son, having just completed his junior year, is home from college. The young man...
Crunchy Pope, Part Two: Against Gnostic Economics
The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity.
As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual...
Last Will and Sacrament
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)