Peter Lawler

In defense of a rigorously selective form of nostalgia. Continue Reading »

George Will argues that American politics is divided between conservatives, “who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom” and progressives “whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.” For Will, real conservatives favor an activist judiciary that will aggressively defend our “capacious, indeed indefinite realm of freedom” from the majority. Continue Reading »

I just got back from giving a lecture at a small liberal-arts college. The tenured professors were complaining. (That, after all, is allegedly what tenure gives professors the unlimited right to do). Their main complaint: Students are no longer doing the reading for “core texts” or . . . . Continue Reading »

Contrary to the Harvard Crimson and Pat Deneen, I think academic freedom in the Socratic sense is still defensible in America. Continue Reading »

The Oscars Display the Rise and Possible Fall of Manly American Heroism Continue Reading »

Years ago, I went twice to the snake-handling Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia—about twenty miles from where I live. It wasn’t my unbounded personal curiosity that led me to that church the first time. I went with a group of Christian sociologists who were meeting at . . . . Continue Reading »

George Will criticizes me for using my comments on Downton Abbey’s “astute nostalgia” to see me giving a conservative defense of the welfare state. His criticism depends on reading part of what I say out of context. Continue Reading »

I don’t find myself at home on either side of the great divide Pat Deneen claims to find in orthodox American Catholic thought today.  But I still think it’s good to be both a Catholic and an American. Continue Reading »

Postmodern conservatives observe that the main threat to liberal or genuinely higher education these days comes not from political correctness but from “disruptive” libertarianism. Continue Reading »

Postmodern conservatives see both good and bad in the libertarian drift of our time.  Continue Reading »