At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
The outcome of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum on June 23 stunned the London-based elite class. It laid bare the deep chasm between Britain’s political and media machine and the alienated, angry and disillusioned majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to David Cameron’s miscalculation, hoi polloi used the opportunity to express their abiding dislike not only...
“You’re probably not going to like this,” David Dale Johnson said, “but I’m suggesting we ask the Board of Review to reduce the assessment by $30,000.” I had retained David as a hired gun in my attempt to get our house’s assessment, and thus our property taxes, lowered. David knows a thing or two about...
No one expects to discover in a drug dealer the character of Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus, overflowing with compassion and the milk of human kindness, scattering sweetness and light wherever he goes. On the other hand, I suspect even the most hardened undercover cop in his local antidrug unit would be shocked to witness...
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday. It is to be called Juneteenth Independence Day. Prediction: This will become yet another source of societal...
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
With the two brief exceptions of Baghdad and Spain over a millennium ago, the history of Islam has been that of a long decline without a fall. What started as a violent creed of invaders from the desert soon ran out of steam, but the collective memory of earlier successes lingered on as proof of...
“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. . . . Our religion . . . has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing. Poetry attaches its...
Georgetown University, the foremost Jesuit institution in the United States, one that was called the “alma mater of Catholic colleges in America” by Pope Pius IX, and a university that boasts of a renowned Bioethics Institute, has recently allowed an abortion-rights group, GU Choice, access to the benefits extended to all student groups. These include...
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” far from offering a careful treatment of a morally complex subject, is instead steeped in the far-left propaganda and clichés of the ’60s.
According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time. He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews. A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself. ...
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
Bill Clinton is the American icon, whose face is rapidly eclipsing both the profile of the heroic young Kennedy and the simpering grin of Jimmy Carter—the presidential images that until recently symbolized victory and despair for Democrats and something else for Republicans. It was understandable if, in the early 60’s, Republicans could not appreciate the...
Agostino Carrino, a Neapolitan legal theorist now associated with the University of Naples Frederick II, has published a series of tracts (available in Italian, German, and French) aimed at the European Union and its claims to legitimacy. Particularly in his last two works, Democrazia e governo del futuro (2000) and L’Europa e il futuro delle...
Robert Pack: Edward Bennet Williams for the Defense; Harper & Row; New York. The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn’t; Edited by Vincent Blasi; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. In the late l 950’s conservatives came to understand the importance of the liberal’s commitment to methodology. Although the right had already launched a telling...
The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight...
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...
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
Bosnia is the United Nations’ first major experiment in nation-building, and the experiences of this multiethnic/multicultural state provide discouraging evidence that the “international community” is no more virtuous or high-minded than the old rogues who governed nation- states. Take the case of Thomas Miller, the United States ambassador in Sarajevo, who is rumored to have...
In Fatal Attraction (1987), a woman jilted by her one-night stand strikes back: she leaves his six-year-old daughter’s rabbit boiling on the stove, pours sulfuric acid on his car, harasses him with vitriolic and abusive cassettes, stages an aggressive suicide, makes anonymous phone calls to his wife, kidnaps his daughter, and, half-crazed, stalks his wife...
Switzerland provides a model for a morally neutral foreign policy based on pragmatic interests rather than “defining values” and self-proclaimed exceptionality. Americans need to learn from the Swiss.
World attention focused on Managua several months ago, as leaders of the Socialist world, led by Fidel Castro, converged on Nicaragua for the most stupendous Marxist levee since Ethiopia’s $100 million bash for Colonel Mengistu. Meanwhile, thousands of Nicaraguan campesinos, dubbed “contras” by their enemies, continued to risk their lives in a voluntary, patriotic, and...
Margaret Thatcher enjoyed being who she was. She did not think of this inner bounce as a gift of fortune but as a virtue, as obligatory self-respect. She was a patriot and a Tory in that way. The party was her milieu—the people whose self-respect resembled her own and supported it. The country, too, was...
Reviewing a polemical pamphlet of mine on Sovietology published by the Claridge Press in London, Arnold Beichman assured readers of the May issue of Chronicles that I am “a serious man.” The bulk of his review, however, supported the proposition that I am a conspiracy nut, a proposition whose originality the reviewer may well have...
The sun had not yet risen when a crew of seven Makah Indians launched its hand-carved cedar canoe into the frigid waters around Neah Bay, Washington. The crew paddled west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and rounded Cape Flattery—the westernmost point of the continental United States—before settling into the Pacific Ocean. The water...
The medical concept of triage became widely employed during World War I. In the industrialized warfare of the Western Front, casualties soon overwhelmed available medical care. New weapons like machine guns, high explosive artillery, and poison gas produced thousands of casualties quickly. There were only so many doctors and beds to go around, so a quick decision...
“Moderation lasts.” —Seneca The American public has fallen victim in recent years to a propaganda assault, launched and coordinated by the Israeli Likud party and their American partners, whose theme is clear and simple: the long-term security of the Jewish state lies in its ability to maintain control over the West Bank and the Gaza...
Your Excellency: This past May, I attended commencement ceremonies at Christendom College, where James, the oldest son of my oldest friend, was graduating with a degree in philosophy. Some of our fellow countrymen would declare such a degree about as useful as the dresses once modeled by Twiggy. (Do you remember Twiggy, Bishop? She was...
“He was just five years old when Mattie Barry, seeking a fresh start in life, moved north with her son and two older daughters to Memphis. . . . Her husband had been killed a year earlier in Itta Bena. Neither Marion Barry, Jr., nor his mother, who now lives in Memphis, will talk about...
I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my mind Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. William Blake was quite mad, even madder than most Swedenborgians—and that is saying a good deal—but Christians less insane than Blake have dreamed of building a new Jerusalem where...
Richard McKenzie, a member of the economics department of Clemson University, here assesses the probable impact of new government regulation of the economy under what politicians like to call “National Industrial Policy” (NIP). He sets forth the major legislative policy proposals promoted under this rubric, and he examines their probable effect upon international trade, capital...
In the space of a few months in 1989, the Soviet imperium in Eastern Europe began to disintegrate like a soda cracker in salt water, and even within the U.S.S.R. itself, long dormant national, ethnic, and religious passions began to sputter and whine. The Beriin Wall was turned into a collection of pet rocks, and...
Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another...
In classical times, the city was a sacred place, bounded by a wall, in which civilization occurred, and to live outside the city was to be uncivilized. To be the founder of a city was to be god-like, so that there are at least six Alexandrias, the work of Alexander the Great; several Antiochs, named...
Friday, a Russian SU-27 did a barrel roll over a U.S. RC-135 over the Baltic, the second time in two weeks. Also in April, the U.S. destroyer Donald Cook, off Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was twice buzzed by Russian planes. Vladimir Putin’s message: Keep your spy planes and ships a respectable distance away from...
For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words. “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...
Don’t look now, but a serious conflict is brewing with China, infinitely more dangerous than anything regarding Russia or Iran. The problem? China may have developed the ability to militarily defeat the United States and control the Far East. “U.S. policy between the end of the Cold War and 2017,” former Trump National Security Advisor H. R....
So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...
The government’s evidence about what it found during its raid on Mar-a-Lago may be contaminated and the case seems ready to implode.
In 1865, six years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, Francis Galton wrote: If talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves . . . we might produce a highly bred human race . . . If we divided the rising generation...
Though we are rightly horrified by what our government has become, we ought not be surprised. Delegitimization and suppression of opposition has been the avowed goal of the American left for more than a century.
The Welsh poet David Jones (1895-1974) wrote two of this century’s outstanding literary works, and yet neither a single line of his writing nor any mention of his name is included in so recent a collection as The Harper Anthology of Poetry (1981), an otherwise excellent volume of English and American verse edited by the...
A recent issue of Forbes contained the truly wonderful news that a corporation is now selling a video encyclopedia of the 20th century. This is sure to be a hot item in the “education technology” business. Today’s students, who dislike ordinary encyclopedias because they must be read, can now “tap into the visual side of...
“Self, self, has half filled Hell.” —Scottish Proverb James Lincoln Collier is the descendant of well-to-do New Englanders, mill-owners “who lived in a grand house on a hill, overlooking a row of . . . the cottages of the- workers [they] . . . employed.” Nevertheless, his new book—which could as well be called The...
The Rockford Public Schools, as longtime readers of Chronicles know, have seen more than their fair share of troubles. With the end, in June 2002, of the 13-year-long desegregation suit and its accompanying rule by the federal courts, and the hiring of Dennis Thompson as superintendent in 2004, however, the school board has begun to...
Few people read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) much anymore. Lines from his poems were once on the tips of tongues the world over. Students used to memorize “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and lines from “Evan-geline” and “Hiawatha.” Longfellow’s once-great literary reputation rivaled that of Tennyson and Dickens, and, after his death, the American...
By the time you read this it might be very old news, and if it is, treat it as a background briefing. But if the son-of-a-bitch I’m writing about is still out on bail and moving his ill-gotten assets around Israel and the environs, pay attention. What you read can one day save your savings....
“To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.” —William Ewart Gladstone A quarter century has gone by since David Halberstam, foreign correspondent for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize that he said should have gone to his friend and mentor in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan. In 1964’s spring...
Did Robert Gibbs let the cat out of the bag? Last week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the world that Iran, unable to get fuel rods from the West for its U.S.-built reactor, which makes medical isotopes, had begun to enrich its own uranium to 20 percent. From his perch in the West Wing, Gibbs scoffed: “He...