Give me, ya-Allah, Give me Iman and victory. Give me, ya-Allah, give me strength to set us free, As we struggle on your path, Mujahideen Five years ago, Aaron Wolf and I first heard these lines being sung by Muslim children as young as six years old when we spent a day at the Muslim...
American literature, Wallace Stegner once observed, is not so much about place as motion: we are a restless people, and we write restless books that hurtle us from A to B with a blur to mark our passage. Discounting Stegner’s own lovely evocations of place in books like Wolf Willow and Grossing to Safety, one...
To 18th-century Britons and Americans who devoted any serious thought to the subject of human nature—and a great many did—the conventional starting point was the theory of the passions, or drives for self-gratification. Rousseau to the contrary, man was not naturally good but was ruled by his passions, both primary (fear, hunger, lust) and secondary...
What happened to Minnesota—the stolid Nordic-and-German prairie republic, the mother of vice presidents, the place where Democrats were “Farmer-Labor” and seemed to mean it? Lately, when it comes to statewide office, Sven and Ole have been serving up not their usual hotdish and egg coffee but an uncharacteristic booya of Slavs and Jews, Easterners and...
We whose parents read to us the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Hans Christian Anderson, Reynard the Fox, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Aesop’s Fables know almost by heart the story of “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse.” This is the version translated by the English scholars George Tyler Townsend and Thomas James: Once upon...
Despite Dublin’s busy streets, Dublin still has a country-town atmosphere, and the visitor has a definite sense of being just a little behind the times. Part of the reason for this ambiance is that Dublin is a very small capital city. There are only a million or so people living in the whole Greater Dublin...
On March 12, I was kneeling at the back of the vast 11th-century abbey church of Fontgombault, France, where I formed exactly one third of the congregation at a mid-week, mid-Lent, mid-morning Mass. At the other end of the nave, the monastic community had processed in with identifiably Benedictine decorum, taken their places in the...
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...
The June issue of Chronicles (“Surviving the Global Economy”) was simply outstanding. This is really saying a lot, since every issue is superb. I especially liked Jack Trotter’s article on the Abbeville, South Carolina, Christmas celebration (“Christmas in Abbeville,” Correspondence). While certain elements of our society feel compelled to demand hatred and shame for their...
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel, That’s just what I am. And for this damned Republic, I do not give a damn! I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon, For anything I done! —Maj. James Randolph, CSA Not long ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...
As he completes his third week in office Donald Trump has already stunned the world with his “shock and awe” campaign to keep promises made when he was a candidate. The mere fact of a politician doing what he said he would do seems to have unsettled the nerves of his opponents. What is called...
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...
The sun is no longer the hot buttered pancake worshipped by the ancient Slavs: It has been reformed into an altogether more Christian, Lenten, and distant figure. The sea is still beautiful, though it too no longer moves with the same pagan frankness, its orgiastic, by turns manic and depressive, barometrically motivated summer feasts and...
“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” —Thomas Jefferson This snowball of a book, gathering mass as it accelerates, is studded with accretions and revisions. A work of cultural criticism rather than of mere literary or even social history, it seems to...
There are two popular theories of how the war in Yugoslavia started. Dr. Susan L. Woodward in Balkan Tragedy shows how both are wrong, and gives us a well-documented and convincing history of the causes that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One opinion, widely held in this country, is that the fighting in Bosnia...
It should be a property owner’s dream. Thirteen acres in the heart of America’s largest city, bordered by two of its most prominent streets, Broadway and 42nd Street. Famous shopping and tourist attractions are all within walking distance. Broadway theaters, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden. Major transportation hubs like...
I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl. Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year. We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO). Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...
It is encouraging to see that Michael Jackson is still capable of something more than Pepsi commercials. That he didn’t pick up an award is, as many have suggested, a backlash against the success of Thriller. But the correlation is not as direct as it seems. The real problem is that Jackson is not the...
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 of U.S. citizens were citizens, even if born abroad. For the Founders, where citizenship was...
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...
The following is written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and which was spent mostly among people...
Americans can now pick from a welter of news outlets on the internet and from such independent sources as this magazine. Yet most Americans still get their news from the usual disinformation sources: the major newspapers and broadcast and cable TV. This became clear to me in 2012. After resisting for decades, in July 2012...
I was part of a group of several hundred social workers, nurses, and other community health-care providers whose employers shelled out a lot of money for a conference that promised to help us work more effectively with “minority populations.” In fact, precious little attention was paid to the people with whom we work. Instead, for six...
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....
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement . . . ” —George Washington “It’s not you, it’s me” has become a popular phrase with which to terminate a romantic relationship. It is considered a more polite...
That Trump is a would-be dictator has been a recurring narrative on the left for nearly a decade now—and so has the wish that he would be done away with, by one means or another—even violence, if necessary.
“Courage,” said the Philosopher, “is the prime philosophical virtue” (by which he meant the moral kind) “lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice.” It is a notion from another time, in accord with which it came to pass that the philosophical cream of my...
Filming an execution at San Quentin Prison is what San Francico’s KQED has asked the U.S. District Court in California for permission to do: it wants the unedited tape to run nationwide over the Public Broadcasting Service network. KQED is not doing this merely to get higher audience ratings. It thinks that once people see...
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
It’s near the end of October, and the air is crisp and cool. The wind blows hard here on the prairie, the thermometer failing to reflect the chill you feel on your skin and in your bones. A smattering of pinks, reds, and oranges coat the white-cored, cottony fingers floating against the pale-blue morning sky. ...
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters; by Abigail Shrier; Regnery Publishing; 276 pp., $28.99 You’ve seen the yard signs. “We believe…Black Lives Matter; No Human is Illegal; Love is Love…” The tone is pure emotive posturing, until you get to this statement: “Science is real.” This is the foundational rhetorical trick of the contemporary...
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...
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947—and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued. France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds...
A group of breakaway Methodists announced the formation of the Liberation Methodist Connexion (LMX) on Sunday, November 29, further fracturing what was once the United Methodist Church, as the farthest left portion of believers take their leave. The LMX website declares that the denomination seeks to build God’s “kin-dom”—I guess the word “Kingdom,” despite being Scriptural, must be problematically...
Almost five years ago I wrote for ChroniclesMagazine.org a piece attacking Thomas Woods’ views on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the science of economics. In brief, my complaint was against Woods’ contention that certain teachings of the popes on social matters overstep the boundaries of legitimate Church teaching because they contradict the findings...
Igor Ivanov, Russia’s foreign minister, is usually calm, cool, and collected, but he looked nervous during his March 22 press conference. Ivanov, known among Kremlin siloviky (members of the defense/security apparatus) as something of a wimp, adopted an uncustomary frown and set about lambasting Washington’s recent “unfriendly acts,” especially the March 21 expulsion of six...
I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war criminal par excellence. Then I heard the sirens outside my house and was deafened...
Who better to kick off a discussion of American populism than Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady Sockless Hank had Henrietta Stackpole define a “cosmopolite”: “That means he’s a little of everything and not much of any. I must say I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.” Likewise, a healthy populism...
Yetta M. Adams, an eccentric and meddlesome bag lady, died on a bench outside the concrete walls of the Department of Housing and Urban Development last winter. If this had been the 80’s, her death would have been cited as a consequence of budget cuts, greed, and flint-heartedness. But thanks to a friendly press and...
Imagine yourself at a fashionable party, a century ago, in Belgravia, the Upper East Side, or the Ballplatz. After-dinner brandy is served, Augustas are lit, and the talk turns to world affairs. The host asks his guests what they deem to be the issue that threatens peace and stability more than any other. A senior...
The Biden administration brags that it has figured out a way to get the benefits of declining inflation while continuing to grow the economy, but in reality they are merely kicking the can down the road.
From the June 2000 issue of Chronicles. “My views on Hammett expressed [above]. He was tops. Often wonder why he quit writing after The Thin Man. Met him only once, very nice looking tall quiet gray-haired fearful capacity for Scotch, seemed quite unspoiled to me. (Time out for ribbon adjustment.)” —Raymond...
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
Dr. Jocelyn Elders has been elevated to what the New York Times calls the Surgeon General’s “bully pulpit,” and President Clinton has uxoriously compared her to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet Elders as the mouthpiece for the healing profession—not to mention the allusion to her in a pulpit—is grossly ironic. Her insensitive, sometimes spiteful public asides...
From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen. And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America’s Party. Thirteen Republican presidents served from 1860 to...
Short reviews of Major Works, Vol. I, by Joseph de Maistre, and The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, by Mark Bauerlein.
Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want stricter controls on immigration. Yet it should be clear that our ruling class is not going to impose stricter controls or even enforce its own laws. What does this mean? The first thing to note is that immigrants, as such, are not the problem....
Senator Bob Packwood, a left-wing Republican, enjoyed the support of Republican bigwigs, including Senator Robert Dole, until he crossed the path of left-wing Democrat Barbara Boxer, who finally brought him to book for molesting women. Ironically, Packwood was a darling of the feminists. On abortion, he was Mr. Reliable. He supported federal funding for Planned...
It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor. Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...