My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
The next administration needs to get back to basics. We need to restore law and order, the colorblind meritocracy, and quality education.
“Meet you at Peace Cross.” In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American...
Decades provide a useful, if not infallible, structure for organizing and understanding our historical experience. However frayed and disputed their limits, terms like “the twenties,” or “the eighties” each conjure their particular images and memories. Whatever we call the decade we have just completed—the twenty-teens?—it is one with landmarks arguably as important as any in...
Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?” Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly. He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...
The French wordsmith Romain Rolland, himself no slouch at being derivative as a thinker, likened his Italian contemporary Gabriele d’Annunzio to a pike, the freshwater predator famous for lying still and snapping at whatever comes. What stood for prey in this simile were the ideas of d’Annunzio’s immediate literary predecessors or near coevals, which made...
Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers. To comply with Sand’s ruling, many neighborhood schools closed their doors as busing became de rigueur. Parents...
Cara Fitzpatrick chose fear over facts in her account of American public schools. The title, itself, fails living up to reality.
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
Everyone in America today—right, left, or middle, if there still is one—can agree that the explosive political response to Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented in American political history. Liberals’ clinically hysterical reaction to the President’s plans for The Wall, to the travel ban, to his response to the Charlottesville affair, and to his cancellation of...
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...
It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder, along with his friend Russell Kirk and a few others, of postwar intellectual American conservatism. Nisbet greatly admired Edmund...
Downtown Montreal was full of revelers last March 10. Despite subzero temperatures, they hit the streets, some wearing little more than a smile. But each had a maple leaf somewhere, on a flag, a piece of clothing, a sign, or even in place of the proverbial fig leaf. Such was the scene described by Macleans...
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...