Category: Vital Signs

After almost a century of dealing with international terrorism—since communism, in practice as well as in theory, is hardly anything more complex than terrorism on a global scale—Western democracies should have caught on to the fact that all social movements, particularly those perceived as spontaneous, are invariably organized, manipulated, and directed by those whose interests...

One of the most important reasons for the sweeping victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty in the recent Italian election was concern for public safety, which ranks as the number-one issue on the minds of voters, according to some polls. Berlusconi promised to do whatever was necessary to make people feel safer,...

Although America remains overwhelmingly Christian in affiliation (if not necessarily in practice), the connoisseurs of multiculturalism like to pretend otherwise—often rather insistently. Public events involving religion must acknowledge Zoroaster and Zeus as much as Moses and Jesus. Multiculturalists find claims about the exclusive truth of any religion, particularly Christianity, especially offensive. They eagerly denounce as...

Robin N—wasn’t sure what was wrong. The suburban Milwaukee mother of three had experienced a pang upon turning 35, but these “pangs” seemed to be intensifying as the months passed. Sometimes, they took the form of paralyzing depression; other times, of anxiety verging on panic. She found herself fearful of going out in public or...

Geronimo: An American Legend Produced by Walter Hill, Neil Canton, and Columbia Pictures Directed by Walter Hill Photography by Lloyd Ahem Screenplay by John Milius and Larry Gross If you are a lover of film but have never seen Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), you are missing not only one of the best Westerns ever...

Until the advent of the long-playing record, almost all of the music of Hector Berlioz was, for most Americans, a silent enigma, available only to those who could read a score and really hear it. Otherwise reasonable critics wrote of his “half-crazy ideas.” Some argued that he achieved his effects, both good and bad, “by...

One thing that distinguishes the French from the Americans is that the French have the good grace to number their failed political experiments—two kingdoms, two empires, and five republics. Americans, on the other hand, profess “American exceptionalism.” They assert that the United States is unique among the countries of the world because she alone has...

There is no documentary evidence of any period in the history of the Church when dignitaries such as bishops would have been “democratically” elected by the assemblage of “voters.” On the other hand, popular election was never excluded in the form of acclamation. A famous ease of acclamation was that of St. Ambrose, bishop of...

Not too often these days does a church service offer me a moment of startling revelation, a line of scripture that stops me in my tracks. This past Easter, though, I was attending an Episcopal service, when I heard a line—or, more exactly, did not hear a line—that had just that effect. The minister, a...

It was not what we have come to expectwhen John Paul II arrives in a Christian country—or in any country, for that matter. In place of adoring crowds lining the streets along which the popemobile made its stately progress, there were scattered groups of demonstrators hurling imprecations both angry and somewhat bizarre: “arch-heretic, two-horned, grotesque...

There are some foreign-policy questions that require all the wisdom America’s leaders can summon—and some good luck as well. Responding to China’s emergence as a military and economic power, for instance, may prove as difficult for the international system as coming to terms with Germany’s rise was in the last century, with the consequences for...

Of all the strange bedfellows that politics attracts, one of the oddest is the enduring liaison between the black civil-rights establishment and white liberal academics. One partner—the academic auxiliary—is most dutiful. It is always there: demanding legislation, concocting dubious constitutional interpretations, justifying quotas, or consoling struggling minority students. Criticizing the civil-rights establishment’s agenda invites the...

On a Wednesday in June, it is reported that a woman in Houston, Texas, has methodically drowned her five children in the bathtub. The day after this horrific news, two things happen. First, the woman’s husband—his wife now jailed, his children not yet buried—stands outside his home and, while displaying a framed portrait of his...

The heated discussion of human cloning and related genetic issues is overshadowing another, equally crucial, debate, on organ donation and transplantation. The two debates have a common feature: They are increasingly dividing those who are called to deal with these problems, including medical doctors, academics, law experts, scientists, clergy, and theologians. Whereas the general inclination—with the...

How could this be? In a Catholic school? Here? This is what they’re teaching our kids? I stopped, transfixed. I had parked my car and sauntered into the Catholic middle school in search of my son. I was about to turn down the hall that led to his math class when I was struck by...

While many Asians have welcomed the election of George W. Bush, leading Europeans are nervous. In particular, they fear that President Bush will reduce their continent’s free defense ride, especially as the Balkans begins to explode vet again. But it is time to expect Europeans to behave like adults in securing their own interests. The...

The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...

Before the Reagan era, conservatives were clear about how they felt about deficits and the public debt: a balanced budget was good, and deficits and the public debt were bad, piled up by free-spending Keynesians and socialists, who absurdly proclaimed that there was nothing wrong or onerous about the public debt. In the famous words...

The present controversy around the restoration of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling prompts the following reflections on restorative work in general, and that of our time in particular. Our age will be known by future historians as one in which all certitudes were questioned, while the True and the Good were on the defensive. Beauty, also...

Not for the first time in recent years, American history is the subject of a ferocious political controversy, which ultimately grows out of the national obsession with race. What is new about this particular battle is the chronological setting: We are not dealing here with the New Deal, Reconstruction, or the slave trade, but with...

In December, the dean of the chapel at Duke University in North Carolina, along with the school’s president, announced that same-sex “weddings” could be celebrated at Duke’s imposing Gothic chapel. The announcement came as somewhat of a surprise: Duke is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which officially disapproves of same-sex unions. Moreover, the dean...

Radical feminist art has found a new home in Rockford, Illinois—or at least, you might think so, if you went to Rockford’s Riverfront Museum Park on April 6. There, in Rockford’s ever-evolving “cultural corridor,” you could view the works of “cultural critic” Mary Ellen Croteau, which included a Mason jar full of pickled—er, it was...

“You may look bad, Bill, but we look just plain stupid.” That was the wounded and furious summation of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen upon Bill Clinton’s inglorious exit from the presidency. Many questions are raised by that single sentence from a lone writer, the first being: Who is the “we” Cohen referred to? His...

Vaclav Havel has said that we are undergoing “the brutal destruction of a cultural landscape that has taken centuries to develop”; within this decaying global civilization “is in essence the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.” This use of the word “civilization” is a contradiction in terms, since the new moral and intellectual...

St. Thomas Aquinas maintains that our intellect cannot grasp anything except through our senses. Recognizing this truth is essential to understanding the city of Rome and—beyond Rome—the Catholic Church, because Rome means nothing without the Church, and the Church loses her identity if is deprived of her Roman character. The Church has five characteristics: She...

It was one of the biggest stories of 1996: Black churches were burning all across the South, the seeming victims of a nationwide upsurge in racial hatred. Tens of thousands of horrified Americans rushed to contribute money toward the reconstruction of black churches. We now know there never was any firm evidence of a church-arson...

Rumor has it that the Brookings Institution is a well-regarded think tank staffed by highly educated experts, whose opinions are treated with great respect by the nation’s policymakers. Unfortunately, these experts do not inhabit the same spiral arm of the galaxy as the rest of us. I base this conclusion on a widely publicized report...

Whenever my family gathers together—usually at Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and nearly always in the rambling old home belonging to my wife and me in Waynesville, North Carolina—the conversation commences before the engines of the arriving cars have cooled in the driveway. This talk, which I have come privately to regard as the Great Conversation,...

“Hillbilly.” The earliest recorded use of the word is from the New York Journal of April 23, 1900. As you might guess from that publication’s city of origin, the term was not intended as a compliment. The journal defined a hillbilly as “a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills,...

At events such as the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, held last July in Denver, traditional believers get slandered in all sorts of ways, most of them indirect but effective. (And the most energetic apostles of inclusivity, dialogue, and openness never, ever call the slanderers to account.) Issues, a daily one-page sheet of commentary, provided several...

At its annual “Ministers Week” lectures last year, the theological school of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas provided a revealing window into the contemporary debate within mainline church circles over homosexuality. Taking a pro-homosexuality approach was Victor Furnish, a professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Defending the traditional Christian stance was Richard Hays...

Maureen Dowd, premier columnist for the New York Times, is possessed of a rare professional gift: She can be mean (often really mean) and funny (often very funny) at the same time. What’s more, her potent powers of observation and sheer talent as a writer usually combine to mitigate her predictable Washington cynicism. But with...

“I saw that book.” Are we likely to hear this more and more from the next generation? A reviewer recently described a book by Joan Didion as “a novel that doesn’t have to be filmed to make you feel you’re watching it, not reading it.” Television adaptations of fiction are notoriously common these days, and...

As we speed along the information highway at the close of one millennium and the beginning of another, it might be wise to stop for a moment, if not by woods on a snowy evening, at least at the next rest area. When Robert Frost slowed his mare to a halt that December night a...

I recently experienced the most dreadful feeling of helplessness and fear imaginable in what undergraduate essayists call “our modern world of high technology.” I suffered massive computer breakdown. The failure of a single computer is bad enough, especially at a point in the semester when book orders and course syllabi are due and students are...

No one could see where the floor began and the rubbish ended. A window down the hall shattered. and I could hear the tinkle and clatter as the last broken pieces hit the ones that had preceded them. May 21, 1981, was already hot in the Clear Lake suburb of Houston, Texas, an astronaut/engineer-dominated middleclass...

I should have been prepared. My Brazilian student had already expressed his admiration for Fidel Castro and the glories of the Cuban healthcare system. Still, his next comment nearly made me swerve off the road as we drove back from lunch. “Of course, some day, there will be a world government.” “That would be a...

Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...

“All politics is local”: once a savvy saying, now a wistful whine. All culture, too, used to be local, but that’s changing fast. The rule of thumb for distinguishing between vestiges of the merely local and harbingers of the emerging global is simple: efficiency. You can fit many more units of global into your life...

“The draft or draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending,” Ronald Reagan wrote U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield in May 1980. Although few remember it today, Republican Richard Nixon ended conscription in 1973, and Reagan campaigned against registration, pledging to Hatfield and others that he would end it if elected...

Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” (his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand) was a plea for the recovery of a humane social order. Nourished by daily labors in the fields, the agrarian community not only produced a more stable and wholesome environment for families and workers than industrialism could offer, but an agrarian...

Pietas—the ancient virtue of respect for family, country, and God—is becoming increasingly difficult to practice in a nation driven half mad by guilt. Our nation’s past, once uncritically revered, is now uncritically condemned. Families are regarded as breeding pens of bigotry. And God is forever sticking His nose into areas where He does not belong,...

Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr., share something: They are the only presidents since George Washington who were elected without having a campaign song written for them. Perhaps as a reflection of the vacuousness of their platforms, the two candidates used popular songs for their campaigns. George Bush surely made Woody Guthrie spin in his...

For all of living memory, they have been making this wilderness and calling it art. If you were there in Paris, as I was, for the public sale of the Picasso legacy belonging to the artist’s mistress and model Dora Maar, you would know whereof I speak. The masterpiece of this collection, Weeping Woman, probably...

“It’s the economy, stupid” is once again the slogan of the Democratic presidential campaign, but this time around it is also the Republican slogan. The exclusive focus on domestic issues may reflect a general American contempt for all things foreign, but there is another reason for the lack of debate on foreign policy: There is...

Before too long, Americans are going to be engaged in a heated debate over proposals to pay reparations for slavery. The idea has been floating around on the left for perhaps 30 years; but in the late 1990’s, it gradually moved from the realm of the inconceivable to that of the nearly inevitable, the kind...

Ride With the Devil Produced by Ted Hope, Robert F. Colesberry, and James Schamu Directed by Aug Lee Screenplay by James Schamus Released by Universal Pictures and Good Machine It can be argued that the War Between the States began not at Fort Sumter but along the Missouri-Kansas border in the mid-1850’s. The passage of...

Abortion is not something to discuss in polite company. Unlike a good, clean murder committed from natural motives such as revenge, envy, and greed, abortion is something slimy, more like a sex crime. Many parents must be tempted, from time to time, to commit mayhem upon their offspring. Such feelings are natural; but women who...

Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...

For seven years (1989-96), I was a full time faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). I grew up in Las Vegas, earning a B.A. in philosophy from UNLV in 1983 before going to graduate school. In August 1996, my wife and I left Nevada and moved to Southern California, where I...