Author: Anthony Esolen (Anthony Esolen)

I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest—sweet and blessed rest—once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what?   Then what? The progressive sweats. He...

If I were committed to wiping the United States from the face of the earth—and I am not—I might begin with defacing statues and memorials with graffiti.   My graffiti would be more literate than most. I imagine the Statue of Liberty’s base with the plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’ poem that begs the ancient world...

Many years ago, Samuel Francis, that keen critic of American politics and culture, coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a condition that would seem at least paradoxical, if not self-contradictory.   When we think of anarchy, we imagine rioters in the streets, looting, setting fires, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets; Chicago on steroids, beneath...

When he was president, Theodore Roosevelt, a patron of arts and letters, commissioned the redesign of American coins, especially the small denominations in common circulation, from the penny to the dollar. He was right to complain about the existing designs; at least about the nickel, the dime, the quarter, and the half. However, the Indian...

What has brought upon us the madness of the “transgender,” with all its sad denial of the beauty and particularity of male and female? To see the cause, we must diagnose the malady. It is boredom: an irritable impatience with the things that are. Having lost a strong sense of creation and of nature as...

One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them.  The question was never whether women were worthy of...

“When I was young and stupid,” said George W. Bush, and we have no reason to doubt him on it, “I was young and stupid.”  It is a double tautology.  He might as well have said, “When I was young,” and left it at that. When I was young, back around 1989, I believed that...

“I have prayed for you,” said Jesus to the apostles on the night before he died, “that you would be several, even as the Father and I are two.”  For the Son, we are told, sees what the Father does, and then goes and does something else.  And Saint Paul praised the church at Corinth,...

About 20 years ago, there was an interesting left-handed pitcher for the Duluth-Superior Dukes, a very bad team in a league beneath the status of “minor”—minuscule, I might call it, though I am glad to know that there are still a few small-town baseball teams not in serfdom to the majors.  The pitcher’s name was...