Freedom of Religion is important to Americans. So is freedom of expression. Both freedoms are traditionally guaranteed by the First Amendment, which prohibits government interference in religious freedom either by establishing a religion or by forbidding religious exercises. What was not envisaged was that the “free expression” provisions of the same amendment—from which the freedoms...
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Changing Mottos
Harvard University, in 1959, refused more than $350,000 in money offered for student loans by the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviets’ Sputnik shock because of the requirement that students submit to an oath and an affidavit of loyalty and noncommunist affiliation. Harvard President Nathan B. Pusey stated that the demand...
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Exclusive Institutions
Mills College recently repulsed the male invasion invited by the college’s board of trustees, and it will remain all female, for the immediate future at any rate. At the same time, in the once proudly independent Commonwealth of Virginia, the state’s attorney general, a woman, is attempting to defend the prestigious Virginia Military Institute against...
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Nationwide Attention
Ryan White’s death in Indianapolis on Palm Sunday attracted nationwide attention. In retrospect, it is apparent that the initial public reaction to Ryan’s illness, demanding his exclusion from school, was as unwarranted as it was cruel. However, it is important to recognize that when his disease was first diagnosed, in 1984, AIDS was still considered...
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A Sacred Social Order
In Twin Powers, Thomas Molnar, one of our age’s most imaginative and creative thinkers, confronts us, like Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin before him, with an analysis of our social, political, and cultural situation that is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating, because it seems to explain so much; frustrating, because it appears very difficult to...
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Racial Integrity
“You only have I known among all the families of the earth.” —Amos 3:2 The early chapters of the Bible present two major stories of judgment: the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The first, the story of the dramatic “liquidation” of the vast majority of the human race, has no parallel in recorded history,...
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Pluralism in Miniature
Science was a sacred cow in the United States in the 1950’s. The words “Science says . . . ” came with all the force of an imperial command. Pluralism has taken on the same status in the late 1980’s. As soon as the words “Our pluralistic society will not permit . . . ”...
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The Treason System
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally,...
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The German Swindle
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
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A Manly Celibate
What the late Axel Springer (1912-1985) was to the world of newspaper publishing, legal scholar Jacques Ellul is to Protestants, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is to writers, the vigorous Père Raymond-Lèopold Bruckberger is to the world of contemporary Roman Catholic intellectuals—a man whose many gifts would make him a sought-after celebrity if his deepest convictions were...