Category: Society & Culture

Over the centuries, plague has been understood variously as a purely natural phenomenon, astrological fatalism, the judgment of God, or, most perplexing, a manifestation of divine mercy. Since plague is one of those natural disasters whose origin cannot be assigned to human agency, it can pose seemingly insoluble moral problems. If, for example, plague is...

Is Antonin Scalia’s originalism—indeed, constitutional self-government itself—passé? The eternal temptation to read one’s own values into the Constitution beguiles even religious conservatives espousing natural law. The U.S. Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” whose ultimate interpretation is entrusted, by longstanding custom if not by explicit textual direction, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Accordingly,...

I first heard the Loveline radio show in the late ’90s. It came on late at night, broadcast from Los Angeles back to me in Atlanta. The format was like an old-fashioned advice column, but with a coarse edge. People phoned in with questions about sex and relationships, tales of abuse and heartbreak, disease and...

Despite living under nearly a century of oppressive, conformist, Soviet-style Communism, Eastern Bloc nations have somehow maintained strong senses of cultural, religious, linguistic, and ethnic identities. What’s more, they arguably have stronger identities today than do most Western European and Anglophone countries that have enjoyed greater freedom for most of the 20th century. Unlike their...

Nietzsche writes in the concluding section of Twilight of the Idols, “One does not learn from the Greeks—their way is too alien, and also too fluid, to have an imperative effect, a ‘classical’ effect.” The divide between Greek antiquity and modernity to which Nietzsche alludes has certainly not discouraged many attempts to bridge this gap....

American conservatives have rightly viewed the post-Civil War Reconstruction period as a tragic era rife with corruption, scandal, mismanagement, and unconstitutional uses of power at both the state and federal level. Unfortunately, many have also been deceived by a leftist narrative of Reconstruction as a flawed but ultimately virtuous project, and this has distorted their...

Those who think that James Comey, John Brennan, and Hillary Clinton are the first East Coast liberals to try to take down the United States have not been following the news—or at least, the old news. Columbia professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven argued in 1966 that the “weight of the poor,” that is,...

The year 1975, for those of us old enough to remember, was a calm and quiet time in the United States. The Vietnam War and Watergate were both over, the riots and protests had ceased, and everybody liked our presiding nonpartisan president, who shared the name of America’s most iconic car company. The music was...

When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s troop, like many other churches across the country, revoked their BSA charter, leaving Waning’s son and...

I teach theology courses at a non-denominational, evangelical Christian high school outside of Fort Worth, Texas. We study the history of the Christian faith, work our way chapter and verse through at least 15 books of the Bible over the span of our high school courses, examine all the major topics of systematic theology and...

In 2002 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, formalizing what had been tolerated by the government for several decades prior. Today, however, the Dutch practice of euthanasia is arguably less settled legally than ever before. In September, a doctor was found not guilty of breaking the law after administering...

I have heard the following remark, or something similar, made about country music on numerous occasions in my life: “You know, it’s kind of hard to take a guy seriously when he sings about loving Jesus one minute and drinking and cheating the next.” It is always uttered by someone who is not a big...

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...

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...

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,...

One evening in the fall of 2015, with the unlikely Donald J. Trump already dominating the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I ran into Ross Perot, Jr., at an exclusive charity event in Dallas. Perot is a billionaire real estate developer and the only son of H. Ross Perot, who campaigned for president...

Canada has not done much to assure the world it is anything other than a dog in search of a lap. Americans declared independence from England in 1776, but Canadians still haven’t mustered the gumption to cut ties with the mother island 522 years after John Cabot planted the flag on Newfoundland for Henry VII....

Should Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or other purveyors of internet content be liable for damages if they fail to ensure that what they disseminate is not inaccurate, libelous, or otherwise dangerous and pernicious? There is a bit of law on this, but we are only now beginning seriously to consider this question. And only...

Michael Millerman was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto when he got into trouble. The trouble wasn’t drugs or alcohol, debt, or academic improprieties. Nor was he troubled by poor academic performance. The trouble was that he was reading, examining, and translating the works of controversial political thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger. His...

The left hates comedy. It subverts and challenges the dicta of the liberal hegemony, and is closed down whenever possible. The Left has had notable successes, especially in Britain, where I can point precisely to the roughly two decades in which the free comic spirit operated on TV before the cultural commissars took control. This...

“You can’t run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity.  An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.” —George Patton My father is an Army veteran, a former auto-body worker, and a retired policeman who for many years worked undercover in vice and narcotics.  Needless...

To judge from what is going on in Italy, the only major European country where populists are in power, right-wing populism works, but left-wing populism does not. Populism, they tell us, is a meaningless word. What else, after all, can populism mean but what is popular?  And so, so what? Nevertheless, populism does exist. Here...

The sight of American leftists getting on their moral high horses to attribute blame to conservatives for the growth of political violence in America is exasperating, to say the least.  The dispatch of mail bombs to critics of Donald Trump and the shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh were like manna from heaven for these...

My housekeeper personifies the American Dream.  Her journey from rags may not have ended in riches.  But she now enjoys a solid middle-class existence after decades of backbreaking labor.  Born and raised in the Mexican state of Puebla, Laura married her first and only boyfriend, Daniel, in her late teens.  The newlyweds moved in with...

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...

Heralding the rise of the daily newspaper in 1831, French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine declared journalism would emerge as “the whole of human thought,” but that thought itself “will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book.”  The book, Lamartine proclaimed, “will arrive too late.” “The only book...

The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.”  Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...

Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson.  “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...

Recently I read of a 67-year-old woman who wanted to run in a marathon.  She had never run for exercise in her life, but her desire and passion led her to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the house, and walk a mile.  Every day she walked through her neighborhood, extending the distance a...

Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly.  In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor.  In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis.  The first line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like...

Rafael Palmeiro has ED.  How do I know?  He told me.  He told you, too.  Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago.  He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with...

One of the subjects that most self-styled conservatives seem incapable of discussing in any depth—indeed, it is one they often flee from like mice before the hungry house cat—is race.  The general feeling always seems to be that anything a prominent conservative might say on the topic—unless he is offering some sort of fearful confirmation...

In the aftermath of the U.S.-led air and missile strikes on Syria for the April incident in which Bashar al-Assad’s government allegedly used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, calls are growing for the Trump administration to deepen U.S. military involvement for the explicit purpose of ousting Assad.  Those pundits and politicians who advocate a regime-change...

Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...

There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson).  There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...

In March, Americans braced for the nationwide “March for Our Lives,” and what they witnessed was the latest battle in the culture war, with children paraded through the capital as nouveaux Jacobins. “This is the beginning of a revolution,” declared anti-Second Amendment activist David Hogg, a teenage peddler of leftist propaganda who has taken on...

While America’s attention remains focused on the North Korea crisis, another dangerous East Asia confrontation has re-emerged.  The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is taking new steps to intimidate Taiwan and force the island’s leaders to move toward political reunification with the mainland.  The latest measures aim to make it clear to Taiwanese officials and...

Facts ruin bad arguments. So let these facts sink in for a minute. According to the FBI, in 2016 murderers using handguns killed 7, 105 Americans. That same year, murderers using any kind of rifle—muzzle-loading, breech-loading, lever-action, bolt-action, or even the left’s dreaded AR-15—killed only 374 Americans. The FBI’s long-term data also reflects this unsurprising...

Few American objects attract more scorn than the federal Internal Revenue Code.  When initially drafted in 1914, it contained 11,400 words, about the length of a long magazine article.  Today, the Code weighs in at about four million words, with another six million in supportive regulations.  Its garbled syntax is easily ridiculed.  Tax attorney Joseph...

These days, it’s the left that’s pushing states’ rights.  And for that we can thank President Trump.  As is often the case with America, California is leading the way. First came Calexit, a movement eager to establish a California Utopia, although that was postponed when its organizer, Louis Marinelli, decamped to Russia, his wife’s home. ...