We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
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Sophistory
From the September 2015 issue of Chronicles. Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the...
Christianity and the Legitimacy of Government
The late Paul J. Tillich (1886-1965)—not exactly a hero to conservative Christians, Protestant or Catholic—spoke of the rival impulses that cause agony in personal and community decisionmaking, which he defined as the clash between autonomy and heteronomy. In autonomy—literally, “self-law”—individuals think of themselves as a law unto themselves; in heteronomy, “other-law,” they see themselves as...
Attacking Kamala Harris as the DEI Candidate for President is Fair Game
Suggestions that Republicans cease noting the obvious about Kamala Harris being the DEI candidate for president are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate.
The Beginning of the End
One hundred years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenberg, visited Sarajevo. Waiting for them was a band of would be assassins, who planned to use bombs to kill the heir to the Habsburg throne. The bombs...
It’s Time for Deplorables to March on Washington
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The Trump presidency eerily inhabits two diametrically opposed realities. On the one hand, we have the Beltway Reality. This is a world where Donald Trump is friendless and on the ropes, the Kevin McCallister of American politics. His legislative agenda, starting with repeal of Obamacare, is stalled if not moribund at the...
Criticizing the Donald
Two long established Trump critics have recently berated the President quite differently. One, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, offered constructive criticism of the way Trump has handled himself in the closing weeks of his campaign; the other critic, a National Review Online Founding Editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, offered more of the same dyspeptic...
How to Live
In her Preface to this collection, Catharine Savage Brosman tells the reader that these essays are of three kinds: recollections of her own life and family, commentaries on literature, and examinations of the current state of American culture. Taken together, her essays, Brosman says, are “an exercise in seeing the world, even feeling it, and...
The Lion of Idaho
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
Italy’s Push for Euthanasia: An End to “Pointless Suffering”
Thanks, in part, to the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, Italy has remained one of the least secularized countries in the European Union. At present, however, the Italian government, led by Prime Minister Romano Prodi, seems hellbent on irking the Catholic Church with its legislative initiatives, including its attempt to legalize homosexual unions and...
Faces of Clio
“The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the learned species, historians, it has always seemed...
End of an Era
Slobodan Milosevic’s delivery to a NATO airbase in Tuzla marks the end of an era—but which one? It appears to conclude the period in which the Serbian people tried to find leaders who would not accept that their national interests should be defined either by a socialist Yugoslavia or by the great powers. Their willingness...
Remains of the Day
Freddy Gray’s “Brexit: What Now?” (City of Westminster, September) reads like the continuation of the Remain campaign by other means. After a balanced opening, his article tilts like the final stages of the Titanic. Some instances. Donald Trump said, on the day of the result, “What I like is that I love to see people...
Jesting With Pilate
Americans pretend to be shocked whenever one of their national celebrities gets caught out in a lie. Is it really so surprising that Michael Jordan should attempt to conceal his gambling or that Bill Clinton should hide his cochonnerie? My European friends—some of them highly moral and religious men—never tire of ridiculing us for our...
Affirmative Action’s Destructive Force: An Interview With Amy Wax
Amy Wax talks about issues of race, merit, intelligence, and virtue as well as the discriminatory effects of Affirmative Action.
For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so...
Light From Elsewhere
In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.” We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...
Should Japan and South Korea Go Nuclear?
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention. What else does he want? Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed...
Illusion and Reality, Then and Now
Years ago—so long ago indeed that I hesitate to record the date—a wise lady of Hungarian origin said to me in Vienna: “Oh, to be able to see Venice again for the first time!” It was one of those casual remarks which, behind the smiling mask of a truism, reveals a hidden, monitory depth. Contrary...
Homosexuality, In the Cards
Homosexuality is either genetically or environmentally determined. Environmental influences are either intrauterine or postnatal. Behold the universe of possibilities! Sexual orientation probably results from the interaction of environment and genetic predisposition, but science, so far, explains only a little. Voluntarily choosing homosexuality cannot be discounted, although the more deeply embedded in genetics or early experience...
Magna Mater, Full of Grace!
“Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” —Thomas Carlyle I don’t believe I realized, until I began reading up on the subject of Deep Ecology, how far the rot of despair and self-loathing has penetrated the Western world. Multiculturalism as an expression of the...
The Horrible Politics of “Equality for All”
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
Homeless People Do Not Have a ‘Right’ to Camp in Squalor and Invade Our Neighborhoods
SCOTUS is expected to overturn a Ninth Circuit ruling allowing homeless encampments no later than June, freeing municipalities to restore order and safety to their streets. But cities will have the political will to do it.
The Other Pasternak
Sir Ernst Gombrich, for one, is glad to hear the news. The eminent art historian stands in the modestly furnished drawing room of his Hampstead house, leafing through his copy of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, recently published in England. The book’s publication had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, and the first retrospective of the...
Catholics in America: An Uneasy Alliance
At first, it may seem Catholicism contributed little to the American founding. The Founding Fathers were Protestants or deists and had themselves mostly arrived from the formerly Catholic kingdoms of England and Scotland, many as dissenters from the initial dissent of King Henry VIII. They had little obvious sympathy for Catholic doctrine or political thought. Among...
Now, the Left Owns It All
That mob that split off from the Donald Trump rally of Jan. 6 to invade the Capitol has proven a godsend to the left. The death of a Capitol cop has enabled the left—which spent the summer after George Floyd’s death trashing “racist cops” and shouting, “Defund the Police!”—to posture as fighting allies of the...
On Liberalism and Catholicism
James Hitchcock, in his review of my Heart of the World, Center of the Church (“City of Man, City of God,” September), argues that the book is “the summing up of a controversy over a . . . specifically Catholic . . . view of politics” which pits me against certain neoconservative Catholics and, behind...
Government: Good or Bad? Big or Little?
Toward the beginning of De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle makes the well-known remark that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”—or, as it is sometimes phrased, “a small error in the beginning leads to a large error later on.” We can easily see that this is true, whether in...
Divorce-Court Demolition
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.
Blood Relations
In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...
Something With Pages
Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification. There is much to be said in praise of the Library of America and the quality of its volumes in various categories of presentation, and in the past I not only have acknowledged such manifest...
A Skeptic on the Road of Saints
A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, by Timothy Egan. Viking Press 384 pp., $28.00 “Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet...
The God With Feet of Clay
Liberty: The God That Failed is Christopher Ferrara’s second 90-caliber salvo against liberalism, left and right. His first, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy, and State, smashed the anti-Christian dogma of Austrian economics. This 699-page tome goes further. It will send the neocons into the corner...
Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters
The name of Andrew Lytle should be better known than it is: he has been a distinguished novelist and author of some widely anthologized short stories; an essayist, historian, and memoirist; an editor of the Sewanee Review for many years; and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and the University of...
Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
Kamala Harris Is a Race Hustler
A Harris presidency would send white men to the back of the line and ignite racial animus.
My Vote Still Counts
Back in 2004, I was part of the 62% of Ohio voters who supported a referendum to amend the Ohio Constitution to define marriage as “a union between one man and one woman.” Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided, in a 2 to 1 decision, that my vote—and those of some 3....
Who ‘Fought to Preserve Slavery’?
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The campaign against memorials to long-dead Confederates seems to have taken a bit of a sabbatical. Perhaps the media have only paused the hype in favor the celebrity groping mania, or maybe pulling down or defacing outdoor art is not a cold-weather activity. In any case, the relative calm was a blessing...
What the Editors Are Reading: November 2020
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
McDumb and Dumber
With more and better fast-food choices available than ever before, why do Americans continue to reward the mediocrity that is McDonald’s?
Studies in Tyranny
“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.” —Thomas Paine Nearly half a century after their destruction, Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler remain the objects of greater attention and hatred than do Stalin and his Soviet Union, although the extent of their crimes were similar and Stalin’s regime was in some ways the more complex and...
Faces of Clio
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
Wonders
Wonder Woman Produced by D.C. Entertainment Directed by Patty Jenkins Screenplay by Allen Heinberg Distributed by Warner Brothers Silence Produced by Cappa Defina Productions Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks, from the novel by Shusaku Endo Distributed by Paramount Pictures Wonder Woman is the first installment of what threatens to...
Islam: The Score
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” —Hilaire Belloc Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that...
Trump and the GOP
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
Home Truths Again
“Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat. A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success. But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August. I can...
The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
What the Editors Are Reading
How is it possible to describe Dostoevsky’s great but sometimes neglected novel, Notes From Underground, without provoking repugnance for the nameless anti- hero whose voice dominates its pages? He is, as he announces in the opening lines, “a sick man…a spiteful man,” yet for all his insight into the nature of his own malady, he...
Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...