Archive

The depressing budget brinksmanship of recent weeks is another reminder of the inherent disorder of American political terminology. Those of a Tea Party persuasion – protective of Medicare, generally...

Tonight, the second season of American Horror Story begins. I thought last season was an excellent, though perhaps unintended , cultural acknowledgement that along with sexual “liberation” come unintended consequences...

The end of Halloween and the genuinely frightening FX show American Horror Story – in which a family heavily interacts with ghosts spanning the generations, where horror began with...

Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan history department is not often mentioned among the intellectual heavyweights of American conservatism. But reading his work gives one the impression he...

If American conservatism is inauthentic but intersecting with ideas of postmodernism through a (non-right liberal) distaste for ideology and incredulity toward meta-narratives, then it is useful to consider some...

The literature of American conservatism is vast and varied, but one missing and vital question is of its authenticity. If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the two most empirically...

I recommend the recent reissue of Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, which includes an excellent introduction by Ross Douthat. The book is a critique of both leftism and...

Yuval Levin, a researcher of the fractured relationship between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, recently wrote an interesting post about Burke’s significant appeal for conservatives as a founding father...

In the past few years, Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg have led the charge to popularize the notion that the governing totalitarianisms of fascism – centralizing, modernist, nationalistic, and...

In response to the Rhetoric Society of America’s inquiry – what are Pope Benedict’s reasons for positioning the Catholic Church as an essential link between enterprise and justice, and...

Because it is fashionable to be late and lists are fun, let’s think about the books that most influenced our early intellectual formation. Not too long ago, some writers...

Now that the semester is almost over, a brief follow up to the discussion about the place of conservatism in the university . . . . . . reading...

In thinking through Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and my position as a “conservative” Catholic sympathetic to our friends on the Porch, I’d like to throw this out there...

Remaining fascinated by definitions of postmodernism and conservatism, and always returning to the notions of sentiment and “anti-ideology,” to view all the brutal ugliness and inhumanity of what might...

Inspired by Patrick Deenan’s outstanding essay about sociologist and cultural philosopher Robert Nisbet, I’d like to define a term that appears as a theme in his work and was...