To Love the Nearer Things
You should be proud of your state, or at least of what your state was, when it was really a state and not just a provincial appendage of the national government.
An Inhuman Ugliness
The arsonist you will always have with you. But must the arsonist be met with cheers? Must all our passions for justice be transmogrified into hysteria?
Our Politics of Everything and Nothing
We have the worst of silliness united with the worst of ambition. Where politics is everywhere and everything, politics itself is the first casualty.
The Waste of Our Ignorant Age
America has problems, cultural, economic, and political, that cannot be addressed, let alone discussed, in the current climate of hysteria, irresponsibility, and ignorance.
Are We a Population or a People?
A population is easy to control so long as they are fed but a people must have a culture.
What’s Wrong With Nationalism?
It is a mark of piety to love the place of your birth, to prefer it above other places, to want it to be itself and not just like everywhere else.
A Massive Effort at Moral Rebuilding Is Necessary
Our cardinal institutions are sickly, incompetent, or perverse and in need of total reform. Yet what we must do, we must do. So let us begin to do it.
A Winter Eden
Something of that odd winter cheer comes through for us in our poem this week, Robert Frost’s “A Winter Eden.”
Read Something Other Than Current Politics
When you get away from the fury of your own political issues, you have a chance, born of leisure and human sympathy, to think about complex matters in a mature, even-handed, and impartial way.
The Bad Faith Arguments Against Marriage Defenders
They assume that opponents act from irrational passion, because that is what, secretly and probably unwittingly, they assume all moral judgments to be.
Advent
Our word advent comes from the Latin, and it’s made up of two parts. But what you may not realize is its connection to adventure.
Reflect on the New Sins—and the Old
If you don’t acknowledge God in your civic life you will not have a real civic life but a mockery of it.
Concord Hymn
It really was a world-changing moment, that Battle of Concord, and yet how did it come about?
Italy for Italians, America for Americans
Reasonable citizens should be able to discuss what it means to honor and to preserve our culture, and what that has to do with the whole issue of immigration.
Memory
We are subject to time, yet there is this God-given difference between us and all other creatures: we transcend time by memory.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
‘The Village Blacksmith’
Longfellow does give us, in the final stanzas, a moral to the poem, and that perhaps is not to our contemporary tastes.
Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple Picking’
The poem is full of suggestions, questions, possibilities, and not much by way of answers.
A Hymnal for American Youth, Yesterday and Today
Remember, recover, rebuild.
American Church
America is no longer like that place where old Frenchmen gathered on a frigid Sunday morning to pray. It is, here and there, like the church with its head cut off but still regretting the operation.
Red Biden’s Humility Problem
“You shall be as gods,” says the Liar, the first great fascist garbed as a patron of liberty. Do not believe it.