Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until...
Despite the increasing volume on both the right and the left of calls for a constitutional convention, the solution to our problems is not to change the Constitution or even throw it out, but to obey it.
There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalisms. Quite apart from the often extremely complex typologies used to classify nationalism, there are two principal definitions worth noting. In the first sense, nationalism is defined as a more or less voluntary aspiration of a people to establish itself as a nation, whether...
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “sedition” had been defeated. Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard. The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are...
England abolished capital punishment in the mid-1960’s when few capital crimes were committed there, and corporal punishment was abolished long before that. Sometimes when I am in Manhattan, reading of the constant homicides there, I recall the four “Mayfair Playboys” of my not-so-distant youth who were sentenced to the “cat” in two doses of eight...
Writing your Congressperson. An unindicted Illinois governor. The American people ever understanding that government debt does not exist to cover necessary expenditures but to provide risk-free, tax-free income to capitalists. American leaders ever understanding the difference between defense and aggression. American leaders ever understanding the concept of “blowback,” that what goes around comes around. President,...
It often happens that when a Greek or Latin word is given a new lease on life in one of the major modern languages, and especially in English, the original meaning of the word may be replaced by a rather different one. This is particularly the case when a word, which was a strongly transitive...
Martin Luther King cannot be retrofitted as a conservative. He was at heart an activist of the left, and his ideas were in large part a precursor to critical race theory.
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il is rumored to be ailing or even dead. Given his furtive ways and the nature of his regime, denials from Pyongyang are meaningless unless ...
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
William J. Watkins’ comment on states being forced to adopt the .08 blood-alcohol standard for drunken driving (Cultural Revolutions, January) is a narrow objection to federal power. The feds are not threatening to jail the entire population of any state which does not adopt the standard; they are only threatening not to return some of...
Art patronage has had a long, uneven, and agitated history, and ideas about it appear to have long ago been settled: we call “great ages” those with intellectual and artistic brilliance, and we also add that these achievements were largely public, since taste and splendor were manifested first of all in buildings, churches, town halls,...
“Ye that make mention of the LORD, keep ye not silence.” —Isaiah 62:6 I am holding in my hands a scatola musicale the size of a matchbox, which somebody gave me the other day as a frivolous keepsake. You can buy one just like it in any souvenir shop in Venice for two, maybe three dollars. ...
Childcare is back in the news, thanks to a new study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Preliminary results of the study, which has been touted as the “most far-reaching and comprehensive” examination of the effects of childcare to date, were released...
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington,...
The field of Gettysburg is perhaps the closest thing to a sacred place, a Mount Olympus, to be found in our secular-minded land. The battle itself contains enough epic material for the admiration, contemplation, and inspiration of a hundred generations of Americans, if there should be so many. This is all lost on the U.S....
On Weapons of Despair by Brian Murray In his February review of Kosta Tsipis’s Arsenal and Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope, Professor William Hawkins rightly reminds us that both geopolitical rubes and hard-core leftists are well represented in the “no nukes” movement that has in recent years received considerable, not unfavorable, attention in the Western...
Prospective readers should not be put off by the words “women writers” in the title of this book. Catharine Savage Brosman’s emphasis is not on the ideological but rather on the intellectual and artistic identity of her subjects, which complement the masculine sensibilities of their male counterparts—Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, John S. Van...
Lying With Pictures In any shopping mall, on any day, you can see a grizzling kid yearning for the chocolate-covered candy bar that his/her cruel mother is withholding from the distraught child. You can take a photo of this distressing scene but will not expect to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, or whatever touches the...
Jim McGreevey, who will be resigning as New Jersey’s governor on November 15, cares deeply for the people of the Garden State. (No, not the way you’re thinking!) Despite the admission on August 12 that he engaged in an extramarital relationship with a homosexual Israeli with possible ties to the Mossad—whom, early in his administration,...
A kid today, if he aspires to anything other than slack itself, aspires to one of three “crafts”: acting, sports, or rock ’n’ roll. He wants either to play a part, to play a game, or to play guitar. He wants to be a player. The work ethic has been replaced by the shirk-and-perks ethic: “I’d...
The aborted Wagner coup was an internal conflict within Russia's elites. Although resolved peacefully, it undermined Putin's authority and has increased the chance that he will be tempted to make risky moves—even nuclear ones.
We are all children of the Revolution. Wherever we look, in the office or at church, whatever professions we examine or traditions we cherish, we are hard pressed to discover a single significant aspect of human experience that has not been transformed by a perpetual revolution that has inverted all the ancient truths and turned...
Whether or not America is or ever was a Christian nation is hotly debated. It is fashionable today on the left to ascribe whatever currently is deemed by it to be unacceptable—“trans phobia,” say—to the legacy of privileged patriarchal white men whose Christianity gave them an excuse to own slaves and otherwise oppress minorities. The...
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
As I sit down to write this, on the Sunday afternoon before the second presidential debate, the media feeding frenzy over remarks made by Donald Trump 11 years ago continues unabated. The content of those remarks reminded me of one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read about the improbable rise of Trump, an article...
Break It Up; by Richard Kreitner; Little, Brown and Company; 497 pp., $30.00 Stamped on the United States’ three-dollar Continental bill in 1783 was the phrase, “The Outcome Is in Doubt.” A more appropriate phrase for our own time could hardly be found. It also serves as the subtext of journalist Richard Kreitner’s fascinating new book, which chronicles the...
Following his doomsday speech at the United Nations General Assembly on October 1—in which he warned the world that Iran’s new president should not be trusted and that Israel would attack Iran on its own unless it ends its nuclear program—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent two days in New York on an anti-Rouhani media...
In my last appearance in this space, I wrote erroneously that Christopher Hitchens had favored both Anglo-American wars on Iraq. In fact, he strongly opposed the first one, back in 1991. I remember this so vividly (I was delighted with him at the time) that I can’t understand how I could be so embarrassingly forgetful...
In a healthy society people live with a wide time frame. They know and make use of the experience of their forebears. They build houses and plant trees that will be enjoyed by their descendants. Among the many things which our Founding Fathers took for granted but which we have lost was a social fabric...
Stephen B. Presser, Chronicles’ legal-affairs editor, identifies a crisis in American legal education. In his book Law Professors, he shows us why a newly minted graduate of an elite American law school has no clue how to handle a case or provide useful legal services. This is not a matter of just being young or...
A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them. Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task. Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...
Since America is in its worst economic mess in 70 years and since President Obama’s designated Mr. Fixit is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, you’d think the Obama presidency is in desperate shape. The reason? Mr. Fixit is surely the most derided man running the U.S. Treasury since Andrew Mellon cut spending and raised taxes amid...
As one sign of Chekhov’s greatness, his very name is invoked (in adjective form) to assess the work of others. But even while Chekhovian has been called into service on numerous occasions—in recent years, for example, to epitomize such disparate playwrights as Lanford Wilson and Beth Henley, or a bit earlier to position Lillian Hellman...
Lady Lytton probably summed up the aura of Winston Churchill most effectively when she said, “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” Those who have chronicled Churchill’s life have been liberal about providing a compendium of his faults. Churchill...
For Johnny Johnson, it was always Saturday night. He was the stuff of fictional heroes who prevail over their circumstances. A British army doctor who later joined the Royal Navy, Johnny came from a broken home, never married, and eventually saw his only child given up for adoption. When he left school in the depths...
The question of sovereignty reappeared at the end of the Middle Ages, when many began to ask not only what is the best possible form of government, or what should be the purpose of the authority held by political power, but what is the political bond that unites a people to its government? That is...
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . . On February 28, as Pope Benedict...
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party. Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart. Who,...
Diane Johnson: Dashiell Hammett: A Life; Random House; New York. Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that...
“He fell with a thud to the ground and his armor clattered around him.” —Homer War Music, called by its author, Christopher Logue, an “account” of four books of the Iliad of Homer, is not a minor event. Its reception both in its native England, and now here, has been enthusiastic. For, English writing, especially...
At the end of the 60’s, the Establishment began a deliberate campaign to destroy a number of American symbols it considered inimical to black welfare. That these symbols—such as the various flags of the Confederate States of America and the song “Dixie”—are revered by a large section of our country for reasons not connected with...
The staunchest pro-lifers don't want to settle for Trump’s compromise, but the alternative on the ballot in November isn’t an absolute anti-abortion position.
How a people as addicted to novelty as the modern American public can remain indifferent to an experience restricted to the last three or four of the thousands of human generations, drawing their airplane window shades to watch a movie or study an organizational chart, is—or ought to be—a subject of major interest to the...
The Negresco is a beautiful rococo, belle époque hotel built around the turn of the last century on La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the south of France. Even under today’s plebeian standards, when backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invade its elegant quarters, it stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. ...
From the October 1992 issue of Chronicles. Probably not since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has a popular novel influenced Americans as deeply as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Appearing in 1969, the book remains, according to the inflated come-on of its publisher’s blurb, “the all-time best-selling novel in publishing history.” If true, that claim...