Like millions of other Americans we cringed more than once at the God-talk of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and others at the Republican convention and in the subsequent campaign. President Bush was little better with his public complaint that the Democratic platform omitted “three simple letters: . . . . Continue Reading »
By any reckoning, Tom and Geri Suma should be Democrats. Both come from Democratic families. Like many of his and his wife’s forebears, Tom started out on the line for Chrysler. Geri voted for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primaries. And they still keep a bust of JFK in the living . . . . Continue Reading »
It may just have been a throwaway line, a presumed witticism, to which he gave little thought; in which case he is convicted merely of intellectual sloppiness. But it may also have been seriously meant, a revelation of his considered judgment; in which case he offers us a window into the blindness . . . . Continue Reading »
Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourseby Mary Ann GlendonFree Press, 288 pages, $22.95 One of the dubious achievements of American legal philosophers and academicians concerned with “rights” is to have emptied jurisprudence of the element of prudence. Constitutional . . . . Continue Reading »
On the morning of March 23, 1982, a group of young Guatemalan army officers brought a retired army general, Efrain Rios Montt, to power in a coup d’etat. Rios Montt, an evangelical Protestant and member of the Word Church, was president of a Catholic country in Catholic Latin America. The . . . . Continue Reading »
In a recently published book, Sergio I. Minerbi, formerly of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaks of the Catholic Church as “the chief opponent” of the Zionist movement past and present, and he identifies “the real reasons underlying” this “hostility” as “immutable . . . . Continue Reading »
Politics, Markets, & America’s Schools is an enlightening, albeit statistically overstuffed, study of achievement, organization, and the political context of schooling. The authors, John Chubb and Terry Moe, reach one sound and important conclusion: deep structural reform of U.S. schooling, . . . . Continue Reading »
The Resurgent Liberal: And Other Unfashionable Prophecies by robert reich random house, 303 pages, $19.95 There are no liberal neckties. At a conservative gathering one will generally find a smattering of Adam Smith neckties. In the back of conservative magazines, there are likely to be one-column . . . . Continue Reading »
Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred by thomas molnar eerdmans, 147 pages, $9.95 One of the most distinctive features of post-Enlightenment Western culture is its desacralization of the cosmos, the flip side of secularism. Not only has daily life been transformed by science—for example, we no . . . . Continue Reading »