State of the Culture
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No Complaint, No Problem One of my daughters just graduated from high school, and a few months ago we were visiting colleges. One large state school had invited her to enter a program advertised as providing, within the context of the big school, a sort of intensified liberal arts program like the one offered by…
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Speed Bumps and the End of Civilization There’s a lot one could say about the publication by National Review of a list of what they consider to be the top fifty conservative pop songs. I find this in general to be an odd thing to do, but one thing that struck me as significant was…
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The Da Vinci Code and the Concept of Fact I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code and don’t plan to see the movie, because by all accounts the book is dumb and the movie no better. Yet I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of its influence. If what I read about it is accurate, it’s another…
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Interior Design Meets the Grim Reaper As I think I’ve mentioned before, there are far too many unread or partially-read magazine around my house. Whenever I sort through them with an eye toward dropping a subscription or two, the Atlantic rises high on the list at once. I greet the arrival of each new issue…
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Staying Put The extremely interesting discussion of so-called “crunchy conservatism” continues at National Review Online. These folks obviously have a lot more time for such talk than I do, and I can’t keep up with it, but I was struck by an exchange lamenting the unfortunate tendency of people to move away, often very far…
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Something Broken I’ve been intrigued by the question of the psychological differences between men and women since the attempt to deny their existence which was mounted by the feminist eruption of the early ‘60s and ‘70s. I took that attempt seriously for a while, but it soon became clear that the movement had two impossible…
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The Chilly Cocoon of Materialism I’m still thinking about that Paul Bloom piece in The Atlantic that I wrote about last week. What’s most striking about it is Bloom’s determination to hang on to the doctrine that materialistic natural selection is responsible for everything in human nature even as he admits that his own research…
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This Culture is Ugly: Dark Thoughts on Roe Day Many years ago I heard attributed to an Episcopal seminary professor the observation that Americans have a difficult time dealing with the Christian concept of sin, because we want to believe that “if it’s a sin you ought to stop doing it, and if you can’t…
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Common Courtesy and the Christmas Wars I hope it’s not just my subjective impression that some of the intensity faded from the struggle over public expression of Christmas this year. Over the past few years it had come to be, in some circles, a major breach of etiquette to wish someone “Merry Christmas.” I noticed…
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Rosa Parks, RIP I was only a child at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott. I didn’t know what it was, but I was old enough to read, and I remember seeing the word “boycott” in newspaper headlines and being puzzled by it. Obviously it had to do with boys, but beyond that I…
Light On Dark Water 