Category: View

I can’t forget the sorrow of my lodge brothers when the doors closed to our beloved home.  We had to pay a bill for a new roof, then the ice machine in the bar went on us.  When the jukebox broke, we couldn’t play “Poland Shall Not Perish While We Live to Love Her.”  Neighbors around...

Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination.  Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another Humpty Dumpty? The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of...

Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture.  We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does.  As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...

In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen).  These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...

Liberalism, in all its guises, is a vision of the final form of political association.  All history is viewed as a slow and painful struggle toward the realization of the liberal state.  Other forms of political association are not denied value, but only because they can be seen as approximations to liberalism.  The universalism of...

If someone is overheard referring to the system of U.S. public finance as “socialist,” most Americans within earshot will write him off as a conservative crank who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.  After all, Karl Marx is long gone, and so is his most ardent American disciple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...

The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency.  Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...

One day, perhaps, a great history of socialism will be written.  A daunting task, but not impossible, since socialism, the “ism,” is not very old—a relatively new phenomenon, during the last 200 years or even less.  A history of social justice; a history of the working classes; a history of the poor—that would overwhelm any...

“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations.  My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...

The present condition of literature (as that term is ordinarily understood), at least in America, is obviously unhealthy.  Its illness is the result not only of internal undermining, “the invisible worm” of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” but of external conditions, the “howling storm” on which the worm (however implausibly) rode.  External and internal decline, all...

I do not live in a painting by Magritte or by De Chirico or even by Carmen Cicero—no, really, I don’t, honest, scout’s honor, no kidding—but sometimes I get the creepy sensation that I do.  That sinking feeling is an identifiable vertigo not caused by imposing stimuli, such as intimidating heights, but by lesser, humdrum disconnects,...

The direction taken by progress to the America of the future, as I saw it, was toward abstraction.  If one looked to the natural world to supply the measure of what was concrete, then this world was long in the past, perhaps not actually with the dinosaurs, but certainly with the Model T and the...

In 1976, the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., met in General Convention to consider, among other things, two questions: the adoption of a new Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women.  Whether they knew it or not, the delegates were actually resolving a deeper, more disturbing dilemma: whether to remain orthodox or to remain respectable....

“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers.  There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice).  There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo).  There is, or...

Before American readers embark on this inquiry into the particular democracy that was born in France with the French Revolution, I should warn them that they had better be prepared to enter a world of ideas so removed from reality as to make it almost impossible to believe there were people who actually took those...

“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports.  The Committee on the Judiciary reported...

For just about the last half-century, since Earl Warren became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the American legal academy has pondered something usually referred to as the “legitimacy problem.”  Law-school professors have believed that there is a difficulty inherent in the fact that an unelected, isolated body of nine jurists working in a...

If George Barna, by far the most prominent head counter among American Christians, is correct, 35 percent of “born-again Christians” have experienced (to borrow from Tammy Wynette) “pure h–e-double-l.”  A decade-long study on the Barna Group’s website, published first in 2004, reveals that, “among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce.  That figure...

“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn.  Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home.  She and...

When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...

Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people.  It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...

“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...

Twenty-five years ago, the village of Machesney Park, Illinois, did not exist.  Today, it is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the state: This spring, the village will pay $143,000 for a special census to determine how far the population has risen above its 2000 Census level of 20,759.  Village officials estimate that 1,400 people...

“If the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me!” Over the years, there have been many errors identified in the various printings of the so-called Authorized Version (it was never officially “authorized” by anyone) of the Bible, the most beloved translation of the Scriptures into English.  H.A....

One of the fascinations of language, and one of the charms of the English language in particular, is the playful resourcefulness, the lexical richness, and the ambiguous suggestiveness of words themselves.  And as the English language is the most agglomerative of them all, we are constantly aware of new vocabulary and usage, some of which...

Excepting deconstructionists, who believe there really is no such thing to begin with, most people who are at all conscious of language are in agreement that it exists in degraded form today.  Similarly, those who do not make a point of being self-consciously “of the people” (as the British used to say), or do not...

Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order?  Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state.  For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence.  Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South.  The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...

The reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Kelo v. City of New London has largely been edifying.  Most commentators, and even many politicians, have greeted with horror the news that local and state governments are free to take property from one private owner to give it to another, as long as...

‘Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips.” -Psalm 44(45):3 One warm, late-summer afternoon in Eastern North Carolina, a few hundred primary-school children poured out of their classrooms and waited for their buses to take them far and wide around the county. My aunt, the principal, stood by...

In the Afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis argued that Romanticism had acquired so many different meanings that it had become meaningless. “I would not now use this word . . . to describe anything,” he complained, “for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses...