It’s tough to be a Martin Luther King liberal. All his life he has believed that bias ends when we recognize people as unique individuals, not group representatives. He will talk about groups in big terms, the “black vote” and “equal pay for women,” but he knows that equality comes down to . . . . Continue Reading »
Wages of Sin The controversy surrounding capitalism was well represented by David Bentley Hart (“Mammon Ascendant”) and Francesca Aran Murphy (“Is Liberalism a Heresy?”) in your June/July issue. Both their essays were immensely interesting, but it is Hart’s missteps in describing . . . . Continue Reading »
A new paper suggests young Americans are giving up on democracy. When we discard our traditions, we can fall for many things, including, apparently, authoritarianism. Continue Reading »
The only viable vehicle of conservatism in modernity is a market-oriented liberalism that regards freedom within law as the means to the common good. Some religiously engaged conservative intellectuals cannot accept this. What drives their animus against the only workable form of conservatism in . . . . Continue Reading »
If there’s any good reason to distrust the self-awareness of contemporary progressives, it's the cultural epidemic of pornography. Of all the Sexual Revolution’s fruits, porn is arguably the one that has rotted fastest. It has defied the categorical wisdom of libertines by growing in users and . . . . Continue Reading »
Saint Aldhelm’s Riddlestranslated by a. m. justertoronto, 173 pages, $29.95 The riddle of Samson’s strength, the riddle of the eagle’s way with the sky and the ship’s way with the sea, the riddles in royal dreams of Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, the riddle of things hidden since the world . . . . Continue Reading »
CATHOLICISMSA demographic question for Ross Douthat regarding his “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism” (January): If liberal Catholicism is to be alive in twenty years, where will its members come from? Who will be not just self-identifying to pollsters but running its schools and its . . . . Continue Reading »
On January 24, 1774, the young James Madison, twenty-two years old and two years out of Princeton, wrote an exasperated letter to his college friend William Bradford, who lived in Pennsylvania. In Virginia, Madison wrote, a season of intolerance had dawned. “That diabolical, hell-conceived . . . . Continue Reading »
During the debate over “biblical inerrancy” that raged among evangelicalism for several years in the late 1970s, I remember someone observing that Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, which pretty much got that debate going, was more a theory of institutional change than it . . . . Continue Reading »
I‘ve been rereading T.S. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society. He wrote the book as World War II was beginning. It was a time when many were questioning whether liberal democratic societies had any future. Fascism and Communism seemed the vital new movements that had the upper hand. The gist of . . . . Continue Reading »
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