“There was a bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing Strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this.” The Odyssey, Book XXIII Where but in bed does the world begin. Where man and woman know, like children. By touch and taste, by gentlest . . . . Continue Reading »
Up and down the oneway streets of houses huddled deep and close together, sycamores, live oaks brace up to the concrete, break through, their dark roots surfacing, disrupting the order of a New Orleans neighborhood. A block away the laughter, the games belong to black . . . . Continue Reading »
It is virtually axiomatic in higher education circles that the more money spent on the educational enterprise the better the results. Although just what “better results” might mean is often left unclear, the nexus between money and quality education is rarely subject to challenge. The word most . . . . Continue Reading »
In George Marsden’s “The Soul of the American University” (January), he proposes two remedies for the decline in religious life in the university: the demand for a true pluralism and the building of an alternative higher educational system in “various Christian subcultures.” As a . . . . Continue Reading »
Now, in April, when lilacs shake in gusts of rain, the crown-like buds Waving thick and green on sceptre tips, I ask myself: What have we been. We two curled tight in winter’s dark? And when lilacs fully unfurl themselves. Their heart-shaped leaves. Their fragrant . . . . Continue Reading »
When we come to measure the success of a presidency, it matters a great deal whether the administration in question made life better or worse for the poor. A culture whose values spring from Judaism, Christianity, and a compassionate humanism cannot be satisfied unless the poor are well cared for. . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Lasch has written a “loose, baggy monster” of a hook. He takes on nothing less than “the western human condition,” arguing determinedly and, to my mind, persuasively that the idea of progress has outgrown its time. Lasch even suggests that progress, as the West has encoded it, . . . . Continue Reading »
In a moment of exasperation, the novelist Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend that the motto of the Catholic Church could be: We Guarantee to Corrupt Nothing But Your Taste. O'Connor's remark was penned before the impact of the Second Vatican Council was felt by American Catholics, and anyone alert . . . . Continue Reading »
We are nearly two years into the post-Cold War era—an era as yet without a name—and we have awakened to the sobering reality that democracy is easier to desire than it is to sustain. The painful experiences of nations as disparate as Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, South Africa, and the . . . . Continue Reading »
Driven by the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, foreign perceptions of China are now being reexamined in a manner reminiscent of earlier foreign perceptions of the Soviet Union. In the early 1930s, millions of people died of famine in the Ukraine and North Caucasus. Walter Duranty, the New . . . . Continue Reading »
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