Wilfred M. McClay

Consider the obituary column in your local newspaper—not the obituary of anyone famous but just an ordinary obituary of an ordinary person from an ordinary place. Consider it first as a surviving family member or friend, the one who has to gather the information for the obituary and select . . . . Continue Reading »

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial is a little different from the other great monuments of Washington, D.C. Standing apart from the bustle of the National Mall, it nestles peacefully amid the greenery ringing the banks of the Tidal Basin. The purity of its brilliant white dome makes for one of the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. by Paul Elie Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 555 pp. $27. If the influence of religion has been largely elided or submerged in mainstream accounts of American intellectual history, then the role of Roman Catholicism in that history would have . . . . Continue Reading »

It is a rare thing for a work of intellectual history to win a Pulitzer Prize. This is partly because of the inherently knotty and abstract character of the subject matter. But it is also, alas, because the field seems to attract more than its share of the world’s most turgid writing. It is . . . . Continue Reading »

It is my impression that many of the finest and most stimulating historians of the present generation are historians of religion, and of Christianity in particular—and, furthermore, that they are men and women who are themselves more often than not serious and engaged Christians. The . . . . Continue Reading »

What is clear is that Americans simply cannot count on their educators to give them the straight story, skin and warts, about the origins of their civilization. Increasingly, when it comes to history, teachers are not teaching much of anything at . . . . Continue Reading »

War taunts us with overwhelming evidence of our impotence in the face of death—death, both as a reality that each and every one of us faces, and death as a symbol for the ultimate futility of all schemes for earthly perfection and human . . . . Continue Reading »

The discipline of history is the science of incommensurable things and unrepeatable events. Which is to say, it is no science at . . . . Continue Reading »

Reading a new edition of Allen Tate’s collected essays (Essays of Four Decades, ISI Books, 640 pp., $29.95) is at once a stimulating and dispiriting experience. In encountering (or re-encountering) the mind behind this rich and varied collection, one catches a pleasing glimpse of the days when . . . . Continue Reading »

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), in partnership with the White House Millennium Council, announced in 1999 a “millennium project” entitled “My History Is America’s History.” The project’s literature enjoins us to “follow your family’s story and you will discover . . . . Continue Reading »