“The only true spirit of tolerance consists in our conscientious toleration of each other’s intolerance.” —S.T. Coleridge Consider the unfortunate case of Prof. Thomas Klocek, whose story is one of many examples of intolerance recounted in D.A. Carson’s most recent book.  Klocek engaged in a brief debate with a group of Palestinian student activists at...

By a generous estimate, evangelical Christians are as much as one third of the U.S. population.  In fact, they are the only Christian demographic that has shown exuberant growth in recent decades—a period during which church attendance overall has been steadily eroding.  A significant part of this growth has taken place in the nondenominational or...

George Santayana’s dictum—“Those who forget the past . . . ”—has long since become one of those clichés beloved of high-school history teachers, who never tire of repeating it to their indifferent charges.  But Santayana would surely have agreed that forgetting is sometimes necessary.  To dwell obsessively on the past, as any spurned lover knows,...

As Alan Wolfe noted in a broadside published in The New Republic in 2003, the study of American literature, especially in American Studies programs at our major universities, has, since the 1970’s, become little more than a vituperative exercise in anti-American polemics. Largely a confabulation of Latino, Native American, African-American, feminist, “queer,” and “whiteness” theorists...

“Satan exalted sat, by merit raised To that bad eminence; and, from despair Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires . . . insatiate to pursue Vain war with Heaven . . . ” —John Milton In his most recent book Charles Murray argues that over the course of more than five decades American society has...

Surely, no American city has endured such a history of disaster as Charleston, set beguilingly beside the Atlantic upon her fragile spit of earth between the Ashley and Cooper rivers.  Fires, floods, epidemics, blockades, sieges, bombardments, hurricanes, and earthquakes have repeatedly scarred her, but arguably the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 was the most destructive...

Few men in America are as reviled by the liberal establishment as Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), he is “a courtly presenter of ideas that most would consider crudely white supremacist.”  Keep in mind that the SPLC is an organization that cites Thomas Fleming, editor of...

The catastrophic “imaginary” (as the postmodernists might say) is alive and well.  Haunted by the falling Twin Towers, we imagine still more horrific scenarios to come: dirty bombs, perhaps, reducing our cities to rubble and befouling the air of the countryside with invisible clouds of lethal radiation; or dust bowls spreading like New World saharas...

In his splendidly sardonic Devil’s Dictionary, that old gringo Am­brose Bierce defines pessimism as “a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.”  Bierce would have smiled—or, rather, frowned—kindly upon John Derbyshire’s new book, an often droll demolition of the...

“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.” —Sigmund Freud An old professor of mine once joked that ecumenism was a case of “the bland leading the bland,” an epithet that could just as appropriately describe contemporary humanism.  Cast your net at Google, and you will haul...

In “The Shadow Players,” one of 12 stories in Anthony Bukoski’s most recent collection, Lance Corporal Pete Dziedzic returns to his childhood home in Superior, Wisconsin, after a four-year tour of duty in Vietnam.  The year is 1967.  Physically unscathed by the war, he finds himself adrift.  His old girlfriend, tired of waiting for him,...

“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold.  Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.  Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under.  Money makes place for them.” —R.W. Emerson While Pierre Manent’s Democ­racy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of...

“Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.” —William Hazlitt The “prejudice against prejudice,” as Theodore Dalrymple ironically terms it, has become so culturally pervasive that many—perhaps most—people are completely unaware that the term has not always been exclusively pejorative.  The Latin prejudicare, in...

“Who would call in a / foreigner—unless / an artisan with skill to / serve the realm, / a healer, or a prophet, or / a builder, / or one whose harp and song / might give us joy. / . . . but when have beggars come by / invitation?” —Homer It should be...

“The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.” —John Ruskin Few concepts in contemporary intellectual debate are more hotly contested than the idea of the postmodern. ...

“Disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Northern and Southern people that is deep and enduring, and you never can eradicate it—never!” —Alfred Iverson Many Chronicles readers are probably already familiar with Reg-nery’s Politically Incorrect Guides (P.I.G.) series, two of which have achieved best-seller status in recent years.  Currently, there...

In the Introduction to Walker Percy Remembered, David Horace Harwell explains that he began his project with the idea of writing a conventional biography of Percy, one that would explore some fresh aspect of the novelist’s life.  Then, as the research unfolded, he “found the form that best suits Percy.”  The result is what Harwell...

“Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” —William James In one of his rare interviews several years back, Cormac McCarthy suggested that writers who are not preoccupied with death are simply “not serious.”  Chaucer might have objected, of course, not to mention...

“The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Philip Rieff is best known for his Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966), a work that many would rank among the most significant...

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy is divided into three parts held together, at times, only by the most tenuous of rhetorical threads.  The first deals with the perilous politics of Big Oil and American imperial overreach; the third, with the looming threat to American prosperity represented by out-of-control national debt and what Phillips calls the “financialization...

Today, the remarkable life of Capt. Francis Warrington Dawson is little more than a footnote in the history of an era that brought an end in the South to Reconstruction and saw the advent of the “Redeemers” and their Conservative Regime.  But in the 1870’s and 80’s, Dawson, founder of the Charleston News and Courier,...

On September 14, as horrifying images broadcast from New Orleans dominated the nation’s headlines, USA Today, citing as its source Charles Currie, head of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, reported that as many as a quarter of the Hurricane Katrina “evacuees” would fall victim to Post Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) and require long-term professional care....