“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn.  Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home.  She and...

When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...

“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...

Twenty-five years ago, the village of Machesney Park, Illinois, did not exist.  Today, it is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the state: This spring, the village will pay $143,000 for a special census to determine how far the population has risen above its 2000 Census level of 20,759.  Village officials estimate that 1,400 people...

Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people.  It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...

“If the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me!” Over the years, there have been many errors identified in the various printings of the so-called Authorized Version (it was never officially “authorized” by anyone) of the Bible, the most beloved translation of the Scriptures into English.  H.A....

Excepting deconstructionists, who believe there really is no such thing to begin with, most people who are at all conscious of language are in agreement that it exists in degraded form today.  Similarly, those who do not make a point of being self-consciously “of the people” (as the British used to say), or do not...

One of the fascinations of language, and one of the charms of the English language in particular, is the playful resourcefulness, the lexical richness, and the ambiguous suggestiveness of words themselves.  And as the English language is the most agglomerative of them all, we are constantly aware of new vocabulary and usage, some of which...

Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order?  Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state.  For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence.  Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...

The reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Kelo v. City of New London has largely been edifying.  Most commentators, and even many politicians, have greeted with horror the news that local and state governments are free to take property from one private owner to give it to another, as long as...

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South.  The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...

What are the basic tenets of modernity? What is the mind and temper of modern man? I would feel rather foolish to try to reply in a few paragraphs if I did not think that the spirit of modernity boils down eventually to only one idea that reappears constantly under an indefinite variety of guises....

‘Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips.” -Psalm 44(45):3 One warm, late-summer afternoon in Eastern North Carolina, a few hundred primary-school children poured out of their classrooms and waited for their buses to take them far and wide around the county. My aunt, the principal, stood by...

When peace came to Europe in 1815, Britain was in the unique position of possessing empire, wealth, and power, which would make possible a century of commercial and industrial growth and prosperity. There were disquieting signs, however. The capitalism that Mill and Ricardo would advance was entering a mature phase, so that the age of...

In the Afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis argued that Romanticism had acquired so many different meanings that it had become meaningless. “I would not now use this word . . . to describe anything,” he complained, “for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses...

Nights are pitch dark here.  Looking up at a wonderfully clear sky, I think of how few places today permit stars.  The sickly yellow-brown blur of cities has killed the most glorious God-given beauty of all.  With the stars has gone reverence, too, and maybe at least partly as a result of the same. With...

In 1989, Russell Kirk recalled browsing through the library at Michigan State College as an “earnest sophomore” over 50 years earlier.  It was there that he happened upon Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan.  “It was written eloquently,” Kirk notes, “and for me it made coherent the misgivings I had felt concerning the political notions...

In April 1968, the University of Dallas Literature Department hosted an Agrarian reunion. We invited John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson to come together in several private sessions to discuss the history and meaning of I’ll Take My Stand. Ransom, Warren, Tate, and Lytle accepted. Davidson was too...

Since his appointment as Canadian ambassador to the United States, Frank McKenna has spent many hours trying to assure Americans that none of the September 11 hijackers came from Canada.  This is, of course, true, but it would be wrong to assume that Canada’s “War on Terror” has been error-free.  In fact, some of the...

On December 19, 1983, a special envoy from President Ronald Reagan stepped off the plane in Baghdad with a handwritten letter from the President to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.  The letter informed Saddam that Washington was prepared to support Iraq in her war with Iran.  The envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld spent another day in...

In February 2002, Chronicles’ associate editor Aaron Wolf and I spent a day at the Rockford Iqra School, a Muslim academy in Southeast Rockford.  I chronicled the events of that day in “Through a Glass, Darkly,” the April 2002 installment of The Rockford Files.  The frank expression of admiration for Osama bin Laden by the...

Every writer is an autodidact, for reasons that are fairly obvious when you think about it.  First, the business of writing (as distinguished from composition) cannot be taught but must be learned by imitation and by practice.  And, second, unless he is a scholar, newspaper journalist, or technical-scientific writer, a writer must discover his proper...

This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.”  To do so could be a...

Is self-education a good idea?  The greatest of my teachers, Walter Starkie, in his delightful autobiography Scholars and Gypsies, recalls a comment made in 1914 by his godfather, J.P Mahaffy, the legendary provost of Trinity College, Dublin, about W.B. Yeats: “Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked under a Master.” Yeats did not end...

“Education begins with life,” said Benjamin Franklin somewhere.  That was how it always seemed to me when I was growing up in Southern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s. I enjoyed some things about school, especially my secondary school—an experimental comprehensive, one of only two in the country at that time, opened to cater to...

Every one loved St Bridget.  Even the sunbeams liked to be near her.  One day an April shower came on, and, as she entered her cell, she flung her wet cloak over a sunbeam shining through the window, thinking it was a wooden beam.  The bright ray willingly held up her mantle hour after hour,...

“Sic Semper Tyrannis.” —from the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia “I want everybody to hear loud and clear that I’m going to be the president of everybody.” —George W. Bush “I hope we get to the bottom of the answer.  It’s what I’m interested to know.” —George W. Bush A bit of folklore, often...

The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order.  They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy.  They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small.  The...

In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12).  Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...

Every definition of masculinity into which our Lord Jesus Christ does not fit belongs in the rubbish heap.  Indeed, there could be no greater example of a man than He.  Contrary to modern portrayals, Jesus was neither a sensitive metrosexual nor a macho-macho man.  The tenderness that He displayed toward those whom He loved (including...

During the first half of the second-to-last decade of the 19th century, three young gentlemen traveled from their native region of the northeastern United States to the trans-Mississippi West, still a few years short in those days of the official closing of the American frontier.  Though alike in being Ivy Leaguers, well-born, well-bred, and well-heeled,...