The discovery that celebrated apologist Ravi Zacharias was a predatory fraud has occasioned much hand-wringing among the American Church. The lesson most commonly drawn seems to be that individual Christians… Read more Some Men They Follow After →
The conventional wisdom on the political right is that university is now little more than leftist catachesis reliably producing leftist graduates. That left-leaning faculty dominate the American university cannot be… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part V →
Glenn Greenwald rightly says that the “monopolistic” and “anticompetitive entities” of Big Tech have “engage[d] in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors” such as Parler, whose “destruction preserves the unchallengeable… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part IV →
In April, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation facilitating the removal of Confederate monuments, nattering the while: “These monuments tell a particular version of history that doesn’t include everyone. In… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, BLM: Part VI →
I read someplace, years ago, that the object of science is, laboriously and at great expense, to confirm the commonplace. Here’s my favorite illustration: Shakespeare gave us (perhaps transmitting Plato)… Read more The Kindness of Prejudice →
I rescued this juvenile chipmunk from a neighbor’s cat. He seemed to be in shock, so I took him inside and gave him some diced apple and maple spinners. After… Read more A Mother’s Fierce Love →
We have been studying why liberty must be more than an idea or speech. Part I considered how ideas are inflected or corrupted by incompatible habits; a bureaucrat, for example,… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part III →
Culture—understood as something not only thought, but enacted and embodied—shapes our articulation of values. Liberty, I have suggested, wears a different aspect under the present centralized bureaucracy than it did during the phase of our free-market republic. Christopher Lasch describes a related shift in our idea of “democracy”: “The word has come to serve simply as a description of the therapeutic state. When we speak of democracy today, we refer, more often than not, to the democratization of “self-esteem.” The current catchwords—diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep… Read more Habits of Liberty: Part II →