E Christian Kopff

From the August 1989 issue of Chronicles.

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High

Americans have been debating immigration since the Founding era.  Congress passed the first Naturalization Law in 1790, which it amended and fine-tuned in 1795, 1798, and 1802.  These acts experimented with different residency requirements before naturalization.  From the start, children

Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye.  In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order.  Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the pervasive presence of pagan classical antiquity in what was meant to be (and is) Europe’s greatest Christian poem.  Dante juxtaposes and interweaves classical and Christian, from Virgil’s appearance

Andrew Crocker did not attend his commencement exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2.  He was home dealing with family matters.  So he missed the awarding of two honorary doctorates.  Shirley Weis, a graduate of MSU’s

I once sat on the honors orals of an economics major who had applied a standard mathematical model to immigration.  The mathematics and data collection were well done, but the thesis was premised on the assumption we can understand immigration

Bruno Gentili passed away in Rome on January 8.  He was Italy’s most distinguished scholar of ancient Greek language and literature.  His contributions ranged from composing a popular textbook of Greek lyric poetry and the basic introduction to Greek meter

In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle the world of Narnia begins to dissolve and disappear.  The Pevensie children are confused and frightened, but Professor Kirke, now Lord Digory, reassures them that the Narnia and the England they had known were

Institutions survive because the old teach the young. The Quakers who founded Haverford and Swarthmore colleges in Pennsylvania had to admit that the Holy Spirit could use the help of explicit teaching to back up His direct conversation with the

For more than a decade now, Christopher Norris has been writing clear and informed discussions of where deconstruction and other versions of critical theory in the humanities are headed. The clarity of his accounts has been a public service, since

Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the

On January 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his state legislator, Colonel Charles Yancey. As we might expect, Jefferson’s letter contains reflections of general interest on many topics, ranging in this case from the dangers of a large

When the right took over control of the French Assembly this spring, with an enormous majority, they left economic matters in the hands of Prime Minister Eduard Balladur and proceeded to rewrite the French code of nationality and to restrict

A tidal wave of intellectual, and sometimes financial, fraud is hanging above the happy tropical village of American academia, threatening to crash down on it and sweep it away into the off-shore reefs. The danger has a distinctly different appearance

“Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee!”
—Lord Byron, Child Harold’s Pilgrimage

What is the greatest lost work of ancient literature? Was it Arctinus’ epic Aethiopis, which told of

“In a state of civilization,” opined Thomas Jefferson, it is not possible to be both ignorant and free. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson laid out his plan for public education. Every free man

The most important event of the waning years of the 20th century is the collapse of the last of the great national socialist powers whose rise and fall dominated the generations after World War I. The Axis easily defeated their

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in