Back in the good old days, we could afford to argue among ourselves about justification by faith alone, indulgences, and the intercession of the Virgin Mary. But now, with abortion, gay marriage, and illegitimacy exalted in popular culture and protected by law, and with religious freedom under assault, we should set aside our differences so...
“I am going to seek a great perhaps . . . ” —François Rabelais Sale’s theme is the restoration of “human scale” in all our works: architectural, political, economic, educational, and technological. His thesis is that only radical decentralization can achieve this aim. Sale first ventured into this territory with a book called Human Scale,...
Christopher Sandford of this parish is not only an adorner of these pages but has also garnered considerable status as a cultural historian. His inquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late-19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric...
When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy. He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds. Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue. Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...
The best poetry—great poetry—happens when sound, rhythm, and image bring about a mysterious feeling of wholeness that somehow draws mind, body, and spirit together in what both Yeats and Eliot envisioned as a unified dance. What we call “the power of the word” is really a pattern of words in a rhythm originating in heartbeat...
I am told President Trump has said that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” In the September issue of Chronicles, several authors, such as Aaron Wolf, either directly or indirectly dealt with this same crucial question. What follows is a mere snippet of additional reflection. What...
The liberal faith in the power of incantation is but one of many ways in which liberalism reveals its essentially religious nature. Following the politically complex Dutch elections and the relatively poor showing of the Front National in the French ones last spring, Western liberals were in a hurry to suggest that “populism” in Europe...
There were two reasons to support Donald J. Trump in the presidential campaign last year. The first was the man himself, whom one could trust to deliver a much needed shock to the utterly narcissistic, self-involved American political system that would knock it off stasis and get it moving again in a sane and responsible...
The Las Vegas shooter who murdered some five-dozen country-music fans and injured over 500 more had barely cashed in his chips when Democrats, celebrities, and the punditocracy—not yet knowing exactly which guns the killer used—began calling for their favorite gun-control measures and blaming the NRA, Republicans, and even country-music fans themselves for this latest episode...
