No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam.  Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...

America has not been a nation for well over a century.  She is more like an Indian stew: Never taken off the fire, the mess of wild carrots and fish is gradually transformed by the daily addition of squirrels and squash, birds and deer, and the odd bit of human body.  By the end of...

When George Bernard Shaw decided to devote himself to the destruction of civilization (or, as he would have preferred to call it, the cause of socialism), he spent years studying political economy.  As Chesterton put it in a book devoted to his longtime friend, Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the...

Faculty parties are excruciating experiences—bad food and worse conversation.  It has been many decades since American professors were scholars or scientists who could take an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects, but they doggedly persist in repeating the opinions they have picked up like so much lint. Younger professors are perhaps the worst...

The troubles of youth have long been a staple of popular fiction.  In 19th-century fiction, wellborn young men borrowed against their future inheritance in order to pay for the wine, women, and song that red-blooded young men have always pursued.  In the mid-20th century, readers were titillated by tales of urban ethnic kids—Irish, Jewish, black—whose...

This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets.  In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...

George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite.  Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses.  Failing to discover those...

Suppose a wife is dying or has been lying for years in a coma: Who has ultimate authority to decide what medical treatments will be used to prolong or not to prolong her life?  Suppose a child of divorced parents is taken out of the country by his mother, who then dies, leaving the child...

Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence—...

The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...

In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said.  A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a...

“Cincinnati is no mean city,” one of my Greek professors used to say when he wanted to illustrate the use of litotes.  I lived not too far north of Cincinnati for three years and spent a good deal of time in what was and is one of the few cities of the Midwest to survive...

“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.” – Psalm 96:9 The psalmists never tired of praising the beauty and majesty of the Lord’s house. Solomon was so eager to build a fitting temple that he traded a good part of Galilee to Hiram of...

What does it mean to be an “agrarian”?  In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life.  In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...

Tony Blair is mad—really mad.  Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it.  At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan.  The hidden...

Once upon a time, I decided to learn Japanese.  I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy.  I knew next to nothing of Japan, though as a child, my imagination had been stirred by the...

A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin.  Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...

We Americans are in a serious quandary.  Our national mythology—like the mythologies of most nations—requires us to pay tribute to the heroes of the past.  Once upon a time, Fourth of July speeches routinely invoked the bravery of George Washington and his men, their sufferings at Valley Forge, and their surprise crossing of the Delaware. ...

Americans, it has been observed, have little or no strategic sense.  Strategy, as any schoolboy used to know, comes from a Greek word meaning “generalship” in the broad sense of the art of “projecting and directing” (OED) a campaign as opposed to the tactical abilities needed to marshal men on the battlefield.  The American can-do...

When Ariel Sharon, facing strong international pressure, proposed a withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, the settlers’ response was predictably hostile.  For some, the motive is predominantly economic—the settlements represent affordable housing; for others, nationalist politics is the driving force: Israel, they say, is Israel, and no part should be subtracted. These arguments can be countered...

The doping scandals that plague professional and “amateur” sports have done little to shake the enthusiasm of fans and sportswriters for their heroes.  Fans still flock to the stadiums and spend their weekends watching NBA basketball games, NASCAR races, and even (if ABC is to be believed) AFL football exhibitions.  As a child, I once...

The “War on Terror,” as the years roll by, looks more like a Maginot Line than like a Blitzkrieg. Instead of hunting down terrorists or expelling Islamic cells from the United States, President Bush has chosen to attack the rogue states of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Instead of targeting Islam itself as the source of anti-American...

The reelection of George W. Bush has confirmed the leftist takeover of the Republican Party.  While conservative Christians turned out in strength to defeat the party of “gay marriage,” Richard Perle & Assoc. remains in charge of foreign policy, and Karl Rove and Arlen Specter will prevent any action on the moral agenda.  Most movement...

In one of Douglas Adams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex.  It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in...

Many Americans are so disappointed with the Bush administration that they are tempted to vote for John Kerry.  Some Democrats who spent the past 80 years waiting for the Revolution to blow over may think theirs is still the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” as it was dubbed in 1884, but, by the 1960’s,...

We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths.  Rooted in no one place, our corporate...