Who has been handing out these permission slips?” asks a writer of our acquaintance. He wants to know who determined that it is alright again to tell racist jokes in polite society, or to publish columns suggesting, none too gingerly, that Jews have excessive influence in American life. Who . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the least understood aspects of the drug problem is the degree to which it is in the end a moral and spiritual problem. I continue to be amazed at how often people I speak to in treatment centers refer to drugs as the great lie, the great deception, indeed as a product of the Great Deceiver. . . . . Continue Reading »
In confronting the race question in America today, we are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, our generation has lived through a political and cultural revolution that has no parallel. Discriminatory laws enforcing racial segregation have been declared unconstitutional and abolished, while the . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps no English poem was more frequently cited during France’s 1989 Bicentennial year than William Wordsworth’s Prelude, in Book XI of which one finds “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!” Anyone unfamiliar with the poet’s biography might reasonably . . . . Continue Reading »
The suggestion has been made on occasion in these pages that Americans are engaged in a Kulturkampf, a contest over the role of common American moral intuitions in contributing to fundamental understandings of what kind of society we wish to be. There are few signs of any such struggle, however, in . . . . Continue Reading »
I intend these remarks primarily for a specific group of people: those persons of good will who say they are personally opposed to abortion but are prochoice. Though we hold opposed views, my hope is that we can still engage profitably in a rational discussion of the abortion issue, once we come to . . . . Continue Reading »
In Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana the dissolute but not, he emphatically insists, officially “defrocked” Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon has been “collecting evidence . . . of man’s inhumanity to God.” When asked what he means by that. Shannon indicates that he refers to the . . . . Continue Reading »
The best way to win an argument is to control the terms of discussion. Any high school debater knows that, and those of us who forget it do so at the risk of finding ourselves in awkwardly defensive modes of public discourse. Take the current and curious case of the term “homophobia,” a word . . . . Continue Reading »
The search for the American political mainstream is a risky enterprise. It can be a salutary and enlightening exercise when it causes us to reflect upon the fundamental principles and purposes that define the American experiment in self-government. But it can also lead to disastrous consequences if . . . . Continue Reading »
The widely noted appearance of John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets & America’s Schools reminds us again of the fundamental problem in American educational policy: the disposition in every state to fund the public schools at often lavish levels and to tax citizens accordingly, while at . . . . Continue Reading »
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