From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, by Sohrab Ahmari (San Francisco: Ignatius Press; 240 pp., $22.95). Sohrab Ahmari: Iranian immigrant, Roman Catholic convert, conservative, New York Post editor, and professional David French critic. In May, Ahmari garnered criticism and notoriety for his essay “Against David French-ism,” published in First Things, in...
Joshua Tait, who is completing a dissertation on the American conservative movement at the University of North Carolina, is a virtue-signaling expert on his object of study. Never does Tait hold back in judging past conservatives by his super-duper progressive standards. For example, he offers this on one particularly revered conservative icon: “[Russell] Kirk was...
In a Washington Post review of George F. Will’s The Conservative Sensibility, Catholic political thinker Patrick Deneen offers the following observation: This book is not so much a brief for conservatism as it is a learned and lengthy defense of liberalism: the philosophy of John Locke and America’s Founding Fathers; the economic theories of Friedrich...
The U.S. is about to make a disastrous blunder in its terrorism policies. In recent months, a series of savage shootings has drawn attention to the dangers posed by far-right, or white-supremacist, terrorism. Commentators from across the political spectrum have demanded a robust response, and law enforcement agencies are clearly listening. In principle, such a...
For the first time since Winston Churchill, Britain is governed by a master of language. There have been few such in Downing Street history; most of those who become prime minister have devoted their entire life-effort to climbing “the greasy pole.” Of the partial exceptions, George Canning, in 1797 a co-founder of the Anti-Jacobin, was...
President Donald Trump on September 7 abruptly cancelled secret meetings with unnamed Taliban representatives and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Citing a deadly bombing in Kabul a few days earlier, Trump also said he was cancelling the talks with the Taliban that started a year ago in Qatar. Those talks focused on four key issues: a...
Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, English polymath, writer, TV personality, stage and screen actor, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. His theme was appreciation for America, where he said he would choose to live “in a heartbeat.” I know Stephen and paid extra attention to...
Such were the deep currents of literary life in 18th-century England that a group of friends meeting weekly in a London tavern included men as monumental as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon. Even those members who are lesser known today—Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan—were enormously famous in...
Much has been written about the modernization of the Catholic Church—especially the crucial years from 1870 to 1970. These histories have been written from a number of perspectives, each with different definitions of modernity. James Chappel, assistant professor of history at Duke University, gives us a new interpretation which succeeds in revising some of these...
The postwar American conservative movement had many factions, but most at least feigned to revere British statesman Edmund Burke. Those who read the movement’s books and magazines were told Burke abhorred radical change, and so should we. In practice, however, most movement conservatives proved powerless to stop the many radical changes America has seen since...
The English actor Beatrice Lillie had no inkling of 2019’s sweltering summer heat in 1931 when she debuted Noël Coward’s ditty “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” in the Broadway musical The Third Little Show. The song’s mocking refrain, “Mad dogs and Englishmen/ Go out in the midday sun,” expressed a sentiment normal Americans subscribed to during...
Your Excellency: A few years have passed since we corresponded. After my last letter to you, I’m afraid I took a wrong path, crashed and burned, and now stagger forward, burdened by more ordinary trespasses. But still a believer, grateful, as Graham Greene had the wheezing old priest murmur at the end of Brighton Rock,...
For 26 years, I taught hundreds of home-educated students, including my own children. My checkered teaching career also includes a semester in a university, two years at a prison, and two years in a public high school. During my last 15 years of that teaching, I conducted seminars for homeschoolers in Asheville, North Carolina, offering...
In Meville’s great novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab seeks news from Captain Gardiner, whose son has been lost after an encounter with the monstrous whale. Ahab’s refusal to help Gardiner find his boy is foreshadowed in Ahab’s behavior when the two captains first meet aboard the Pequod: “Immediately he was recognized by Ahab for a...
Greens often make conservatives and populists see red—or Reds. In 2004, Australian politician John Anderson called his country’s Greens “watermelons…green on the outside, and very, very, very red on the inside.” His fruity metaphor has become something of a conservative cliché. It is easy to see why. Green policies are frequently further to the left...
According to the official narrative, on Aug. 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire playboy charged with sex-trafficking minors, committed suicide in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Only a third of Americans actually believe this narrative, according to polling. What’s captured the public’s attention is the combination of Epstein’s...
Comedy has long been under the left’s control, as just one province of the U.S. entertainment empire centered in Hollywood—which is itself a bastion of leftist control over mainstream culture. But comedy is a rebellious province by its nature, as what comics and their audiences find funny is often the opposite of what the left...
The afternoon of Monday, August 19, I was at home in my apartment in the city center of São Paulo. Glancing out the window, I noticed the sky was unusually dark. I figured it was about to rain, so I told my children we had to cancel our trip to the park. I thought no...
Where’d You Go, Bernadette Produced and distributed by Annapurna Pictures; Written and directed by Richard Linklater, from the novel by Maria Semple Framing John DeLorean Produced by XYZ Films, distributed by Sundance Selects ; Directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce; Screenplay by Dan Greeney and Alexandra Orton Double Indemnity (1944) Produced and distributed...
The newspaper boxes can be found around Washington, D.C., ranging from Union Station near the Hill to Foggy Bottom in the vicinity of the State Department. Inside, the newspaper articles emphasize positive, even entrepreneurial themes: investment opportunities, technological advances, the virtues of trade and economic integration. This world view, at first glance, could be mistaken...
How is it possible to describe Dostoevsky’s great but sometimes neglected novel, Notes From Underground, without provoking repugnance for the nameless anti- hero whose voice dominates its pages? He is, as he announces in the opening lines, “a sick man…a spiteful man,” yet for all his insight into the nature of his own malady, he...
Most Chronicles readers will no doubt recall the sordid Jussie Smollett hoax, which played out over the course of almost three months early this year in a scenario that might have been scripted for reality TV. Given the media’s saturation coverage of the fiasco, I will forego a reprise of the details. Instead, I wish...
