Give Isaiah Berlin this much: He had the good sense to choose Henry Hardy as an editor and literary trustee. Since Berlin’s death in 1997, Hardy has moved at a reasonable pace in releasing Berlin’s unpublished papers, but he has taken great care to do it right. A case in point is last year’s Freedom...
The inaugural editorial of the Nicotine Theological Journal (January 1997) took a few fun swipes at teetotalers and scolds (including Al Gore), who admittedly, in the words of Garrison Keillor, “live longer, but they live dumber.” “The sun,” the editors quoted C.S. Lewis as saying, “looks down on nothing half so good as a household...
Most partisan recollections of the economic world that existed before Adam Smith conjure up words from “feudal” to “primitive” to “mercantilistic” to “Catholic”—a dark era ridden by “just price” theory, wanton poverty induced by ridiculous regulation and barriers to international trade, and the divine right of kings. Then (so the story goes), Smith published The...
It is often said that former Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, the man credited with setting fire to the tinderbox that became the First Great Awakening, was a fiery preacher. His message was certainly incendiary, but by modern standards he was nothing of the sort. According to minister Victor Shepherd, Edwards may have “thundered like a...
Most political junkies in the United States are at least marginally familiar with Chris Matthews. The dustjacket of his most recent book—with a goofy, grinning Matthews in suit and tie superimposed over an image of the Capital dome—is meant to jog these people’s memories as they browse the local Barnes & Noble: Oh yeah, there’s...
Some writers, by dint of hard work, luck, mock outrageousness, and an acute instinct for the acceptable limits of dissent, are able to rise to the prized status of Tellers of Truth. Unlike Orwell—who was a bona fide secular prophet and, therefore, ignored—they are rewarded in their lifetimes with brisk-selling books, access to important media...
It is 1923, hot on the heels of the Progressive era and World War I. Radio Broadcast magazine confidently opines that the advent of radio as a popular medium “is destined, economically and politically, to bind us together more firmly.” It might even produce “to some extent at least, unification of the religious ideas of...
Every night before bed, Eleanor Roosevelt—first lady, feminist, and the spirit Hillary Clinton most wants to contact in the Great Beyond—knelt beside her bed and prayed her improvised prayer: Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to...
Trekking north along the closest major artery, Canada-bound travelers are treated to a small hotel with a decorative windmill, several car dealerships, and a shopping center with a McDonald’s, a Blockbuster, and a Subway—all common manifestations of the Pax Americana. Then, however, they reach a graveyard. Bisected by Front Street, the bricked-in cemetery with decorative...
The implosion of the right-wing official opposition Alliance Party under its young evangelical leader Stockwell Day dominates the headlines of most of Canada’s papers and feisty tabloids: Will the “gang of eight” dissident Alliance MPs be hung out to dry? Will Stock get drummed out over some Zionist-sounding remarks that set the tender Canadian sensibilities...