The state of the Union is divided, as we were reminded not only after but during the President’s speech of February 5. Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” several times in response to lines delivered to elicit the same; Democrats (upon whom the camera lovingly lingered) competed for the honor of “best sour expression/sneer by an elected...
However much they may enjoy watching Captain von Trapp sing “Edelweiss” in The Sound of Music, most Catholic intellectuals nowadays are squeamish about delving too deeply into the production’s historical background. Such reticence is hardly surprising, for in Von Trapp’s day Catholic Austria was led by Engelbert Dollfuss—a man deeply enthusiastic about his Germanic heritage,...
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that you have just landed at New York’s JFK International Airport after a 15-hour flight from Mumbai. Although you splurged for a business-class ticket, the extra-large seat, constant parade of food, and infinite selection of video entertainment didn’t help you forget you were trapped in a steel tube 35,000...
About 50 miles south and east of Rome, high in the Apennine mountains, lies the Charterhouse of Trisulti whose isolated magnificence prompted the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius (who stumbled upon it in the 1850’s) to write in his classic work Years of Wandering in Italy, “If a place exists where the human spirit can reach...
Secular anti-Catholicism can fairly be described as the ruling ideology of the modern Republic of Ireland. In no other country do politicians and the media so openly, persistently, and savagely attack the Catholic Church. In no other country do leading politicians seek to score political points by launching virulent attacks on the Church and all...
Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end. The latest is the best to date. Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources. These include the private diaries of King George VI...
The reality of place has weighed heavily on me from a very young age. My knowledge of self has always been inseparable from the place in which I live. My understanding of who I am has been closely tied to those with whom I most often interact—family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even those with whom...
Pope Francis, the first Pontiff to visit the Arabian Peninsula, attended a hugely publicized interfaith meeting in the United Arab Emirates on February 4 as part of what the Vatican described as his “outreach to the Muslim world.” The following day he held an open-air Mass in Abu Dhabi, attended by 135,000 Catholic guest workers...
Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re upset. The Donald seems finally to have united the United States. Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men. Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose-step, and Trump the loathsome...
As fall turned into winter, there were unmistakable signs of paleoconservative dissatisfaction with President Trump. In various forums, several paleoconservatives expressed displeasure that Trump had surrounded himself with unrepentant Bush Republicans and neoconservatives; that he was listening too much to his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who may be even further to the...
If Madonna were a standard white person, her appearance at the August 2018 MTV Video Music Awards—at which she delivered a rambling, self-referential soliloquy about the influences she’d absorbed from Aretha Franklin while costumed in an alarming getup that might, in Hollywood parlance, be described as “Bride of Frankenstein Meets Ancient Egyptian Concubine”—would have brought...
Last year, in a January 3 review published by the Daily Telegraph, Hannah Furness made some remarkable assertions concerning the presentation of traditional operas on the modern stage. Furness quoted the tenor Michael Fabiano, then playing the Duke in a Royal Opera House production of Rigoletto, to the effect that “the treatment of women in...
The Turkic peoples began as steppe nomads, then became soldiers and eventually farmers and city-dwellers. As they made these transitions they came to dominate ancient centers along the Silk Road. So they ended up at crossroads and thoroughfares, places where Christian, Muslim, and Jew met with those from farther afield. Such places seem romantic, but...
Toxic is the combination of equality and evolution, of Rousseau and Darwin. Blended together and served upon the paps of public schools, television, and social media, they are the essential ingredients of the gall-milk of the postmodern world. They ensure that every infant will grow into a fully mature Ignoble Savage. Rousseau gave the West...
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, by Zachary Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 784 pp., $40.00). This is the second volume of the author’s biography of Saul Bellow, a massive and no doubt definitive work, minutely researched and very well written. Nevertheless, the patience required of the reader to pursue such...
I’m rereading large portions of Ed Abbey’s books (of course) as Chronicles goes to press: Desert Solitaire, Black Sun and The Fool’s Progress (both novels), Abbey’s Road, One Life at a Time, Please, Down the River, Beyond the Wall, The Journey Home . . . the record of a full, busy, and productive lifetime in...
Dr. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, aetat. 59, is under enormous pressure to resign his position after a conservative website revealed the fact that his page in his medical school yearbook from 1984 carries a photograph of two men, one in blackface and the other in the robes of the KKK, standing side...
It seems that a part of Donald Trump’s base—the part that writes and otherwise comments on him, anyway—is angry with the President for having reopened the portions of the federal government he had shut down for 35 days after failing to obtain congressional funding for his Big Beautiful Wall. Some of these people saw this...
The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey. This column appears as a chapter in The Hundredth Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West (Chronicles Press). It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary...
The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11. We have occupied Afghanistan for over 17 years now, but still we cannot leave because the Taliban could then return to power and once again grant haven to terrorists who...
It would be fun to write a Westminster column that wasn’t about Brexit. I’m afraid I can’t. Brexit is Britain, to a large extent, these days, at least as far as the news is concerned. It has made the political and media classes go mad. Normal people, those who don’t spend their lives reading the...
Vice Directed and written by Adam McKay Produced and distributed by Annapurna Pictures Wildlife Produced by June Pictures and Nine Stories Productions Directed by Paul Dano Screenplay by Paul Dana and Zoe Kazan adapted from Richard Ford’s novel Distributed by IFC Films In Vice, director Adam McKay takes a hatchet to Dick Cheney, joining...
Dr. Daniel Mahoney, the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, has written a most scholarly and challenging book, in which he argues that “humanitarianism” without grounding in faith is a danger to our civilization. This philosophy seeks to create a “new man” and produce a “new humanity,” with roots in Auguste Comte’s “religion...
