“Priminent [sic] National Education Reformer Making a Home in Nashville,” announced the headline on Google News.  Just in the nick of time, you might think, but when you read the story on Missouri News Horizon’s website, you will find that the great reformer, one Michelle Rhee, is serving up the usual empty portions of educationese...

The city-state is the seedbed of civilization, but the concept seems alien to the American tradition.  Nonetheless, our cities did once possess, at least before the Revolution, many of the same rights enjoyed by English and European burgs.  In the Anglo-American world, the liberties of cities were defined by the charters they received either from...

Visitors to Charleston sometimes take note of the Latin inscriptions on historical plaques: Collegium Carolopolitanum, Diocesis Carolopolitana, and, most commonly, Carolopolis, the Latin version of Charleston’s name, which sounds like one of those Greek cities created by Alexander the Great and his successors somewhere in the hinterlands of Bithynia or Afghanistan.  Charleston has always been...

I arrived a few minutes late for the meeting with the hippie roofer.  Two many DUIs had cost him his driver’s license, and I had to take him to the home-improvement store.  “Been to church?” he asked.  Dressed in a suit at 10:30 on Sunday morning, I was forced to admit the fact.  “I’ve read...

“There’s something almost un-American about etiquette. . . . For a lot of Americans the idea that there are rules out there about the proper way to behave, rules more elaborate than just common sense, seems pretentious, European, like one more thing we fought the British to be free of.” —Nancy Updike, This American Life,...

When Abraham Lincoln tried to explain the issue between North and South, he said it was a test of the conception on which America had been founded, “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln, inadvertently revealing the principle on which a revolution was being...

Gloria is angry.  This is nothing new, of course, but these days her righteous indignation is directed against Hollywood.  She is angry at Hollywood stars who adopt children only to neglect them, and she is outraged by stage parents who prostitute dim-witted girls like Britney and Lindsay and Miley to the entertainment “industry.”  She says...

Lurking just beneath the surface of every revolutionary movement is the same deceitful dream.  Once upon a time, long, long ago, men and women lived in peace and justice and unity, until into this garden entered the snake: the capitalist, the patriarch, the man of war, the bishop.  Come the Revolution, we shall all “get...

Atheists have no god to worship.  This is by no means a tautology.  Belief in god is ingrained in our nature, and Anselm’s proof is the nearest thing to an effective rebuttal of atheism.  Put in simple terms, Anselm’s argument is that we know that god exists because we have the category god in our...