If you are a woman and you worry about your safety, you are not alone. A recent Gallup poll reported that six of ten women in America are afraid to walk in their own neighborhoods or go out alone at night. For these women, the feeling of an ever-present threat of violence effectively denies them...
I do not believe in unilateral disarmament: not for the nation; not for our citizens. Neither did the Founding Fathers. They were students of history, especially of classical antiquity. They knew the history of the Greek city-states and Rome as well as they knew the history of the American colonies. This led them to conclude that...
No one really owns the copyright to the word classical. Even in the realm of education, many are pursuing distinct objectives, and all with a legitimate claim to that word. From neoclassicists to Thomists to classical Protestants, the word readily fits. So, in discussing the state of classical and Christian education, I need to take...
The great American universities are, on the whole, the best in the world, and any European who comes to teach in them is sure to be impressed by the liveliness and enthusiasm of many American students. However, there are drawbacks that are bound to be noticed quickly by someone whose academic subject is the literature...
Sophocles’ Antigone is a drama about a young woman who defies orders because she believes them to be wrong. Her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, had proclaimed that no one was to give the rites of burial to Antigone’s brother Polynices, because he besieged his own homeland. However, Greek religious custom unambiguously requires that...
The opening sentence of Herodotus’ Histories, which recount the wars fought between Greece and Persia in the early fifth century B.C., unrolls like a long musical phrase rising to its Homeric crescendo and then dying away into momentary quiet: Herodotus of Halicarnassus here publishes the results of his research, in order that the actions performed...
“Remember Pearl Harbor” was a phrase familiar to everyone I knew growing up. In a sneak attack, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! This was a dastardly, despicable act. A sneak attack! The politically correct today like to say “surprise attack,” but that is something done in time of war. The Japanese attacked without a declaration...
Are the Dixie Chicks traitors? Lead singer Natalie Maines boldly announced at a concert in London, just before the beginning of our recent armed incursion into Iraq, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” The firestorm that ensued involved coordinated radio boycotts of the Chicks’ music...
In a small café in Belgrade nearly 20 years ago, I had a drink with a young man named Michael. He was an architect and, like many people I met there, was no friend of the Soviet regime, which was the subject of our conversation. I had just visited the Soviet Union, passing through Belgrade...
The question of sovereignty reappeared at the end of the Middle Ages, when many began to ask not only what is the best possible form of government, or what should be the purpose of the authority held by political power, but what is the political bond that unites a people to its government? That is...
Augustin Cochin, born in 1876, died prematurely—as did so many other French intellectuals of his generation—killed at the front in 1916. He did have enough time, however, to carry out between 1909 and 1914 a series of in-depth studies, the fruit of his archival research on the sequence of preparatory elections for the Estates-General in...
Taken as a whole, the French Revolution, like any other historical event, may be understood in many ways. Excluding material or circumstantial causes, I see it as a sort of drama, each act of which is performed by characters—sometimes the same, sometimes different—who all, driven by some idea, strive to achieve a certain goal that...
Edmund Burke records that two thirds of the Anglican clergy initially supported the French Revolution. He wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France to show that the Revolution was not merely an understandable effort at reform but an entirely unique intellectual and spiritual pathology. A language for this disorder of the soul did not exist...
When I sat down to write this article, Google reminded me that, when it comes to the issue of contraception, the stakes are very high. To check the date of publication of Dr. Charles Provan’s important work The Bible and Birth Control, I typed “Charles, Provan, Bible, Birth Control” into the mother of all search...
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
People often ask me, “What is wrong with our priests?” or “Why don’t our bishops say more about abortion? They seem to have no trouble whatsoever speaking out quite freely when it comes to war or capital punishment.” On the surface, this is disturbing. I find it even more disturbing, however, that I, a layman,...
No metaphor in American letters has had a greater influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State.” Many Americans accept it as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed Church-State arrangement, and it has become the locus classicus of the notion that the First Amendment separated religion and...
Human liberty has two distinguishable but inseparable dimensions: the liberty of the individual to act according to his own reason and the corporate liberty of a moral community to pursue a vision of the good lived out in institutions and traditions that bind generations. These two dimensions are necessarily in tension. The individual’s autonomy can...
The impact of judicial review has been profound and often detrimental to the rule of law in America. Judicial review is the power of the courts to void federal, state, and local laws and ordinances that they have determined to be incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Certainly, national and state legislatures have passed laws that...
One way of telling the story of American culture and politics in the second half of the 20th century is to present it as a revolt against the group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males who dominated the country from the time of William Bradford to that of Dwight David Eisenhower. This narrative helps to explain...
There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalisms. Quite apart from the often extremely complex typologies used to classify nationalism, there are two principal definitions worth noting. In the first sense, nationalism is defined as a more or less voluntary aspiration of a people to establish itself as a nation, whether...
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
“Ye that make mention of the LORD, keep ye not silence.” —Isaiah 62:6 I am holding in my hands a scatola musicale the size of a matchbox, which somebody gave me the other day as a frivolous keepsake. You can buy one just like it in any souvenir shop in Venice for two, maybe three dollars. ...
The two roots onto which Western Christendom was grafted proposed very different notions about depicting the gods. The Greeks famously made images of Athena and Zeus, always depicting them as man writ large, and were untroubled by this glaring anthropomorphism. Hebrew tradition, on the other hand, said nothing about making or worshiping images of God. ...
“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
A recent phenomenon in the United States is that no one knows any longer to what extent the country, our states, or our municipalities can participate in the display of such traditional religious symbols as crèches, crosses, menorahs, or even the Ten Commandments. Until the last half of the 20th century, no one seemed too concerned...
From October 23 to October 26, 2002, all of Russia—and much of the world—was focused on the Dubrovka theater complex in Moscow. A band of Chechen terrorists had seized the complex during a performance of the popular musical Nord Ost, holding a group of about 750 hostages captive as the band’s leader, Movsar Barayev, nephew...
Iraq is the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fertile area around and between the two great rivers, the territory between Baghdad, the ancient capital of the entire Arab world, and Basra, over 500 miles away where the great rivers converge as the Shatt-el-Arab before entering the Persian Gulf. Some say Iraq is...
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Political experts are certain that war with Iraq is on the horizon, though there is some disagreement about how distant that horizon might be. The way the Bush administration and media pundits invoke the words “justice” and “just war” without actually calling attention to the historical criteria for a just war has been disconcerting. The...
There may be no more pitiful sight than that of tides of impoverished and starving refugees; there may be no greater irony than grievous want in the Third World amidst exploding possibilities in the First. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population lives on less than one dollar per day. More than half survives on...
As war clouds loom over the political landscape and the propaganda wafts thickly from the major news media, we have to ask: Where does all of this come from? Who is behind the rush to war? Pat Buchanan has utilized a useful phrase to describe the origins of this bloodlust: the War Party. This term...
“What doth it profit a man if he gain control of the whole world and lose control of his country?” My first encounter with the new, post-national ruling class came in the early 1980’s. I was a young broadcaster with the BBC Yugoslav Service (as it was called then), and my work took me to...
At the end of every major period of international strife since at least the Seven Years War, the claim has been put forth that a New World Order has finally arrived that makes possible the substitution of commerce for geopolitics and of law for armaments. This view came into its own after the Napoleonic Wars...
Saint Augustine did not originally desire to be a pastor. When, in 387, he finally surrendered to the Holy Ghost in the garden of his “philosophers’ estate” in the countryside outside Milan, he intended to follow the example of Saint Anthony and live a life of quiet solitude, separated from the temptations and trials of...
“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen.” “God granted that the life of this holy man should be a long one, for the benefit and happiness of holy Church, and he lived seventy-six years, nearly forty of them as priest or bishop. In the course of...
As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
America’s present position is paradoxical. On the one hand, her unparalleled power and wealth are reflected in the astoundingly imperialist “National Security Strategy” unveiled last October, which asserts a right to stop any country “from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.” That America is a...
Freedom is under serious assault today. Government takes and spends nearly half of America’s income. Regulation further extends the power of the state in virtually every area of people’s lives. Increasing numbers of important, personal decisions are made by some public functionary, more often than not based in Washington, D.C. Virtue, too, seems to be...
As we look around at the pandemonium that characterizes the circus maximus of our once-great culture, there are few things as striking as the large number of what we might call “disconnected pockets of sanity,” otherwise known as nuclear families. And the fact that they are disconnected means that the sanity is illusory. When it...
I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like. (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run...
Larry Ellison has an idea. The relentlessly self-promoting CEO of Oracle Corp., a Silicon Valley software company famous for its ability to grab government contracts, envisions post-September 11 America as a country where everyone walks around with a “smart card.” Days after the terrorist attacks, the opportunistic Ellison was all over the media claiming that...
If constitutional liberties are as old as the republic itself (older if you include the tradition of English common law), violations of those liberties are just as old. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson threw their political opponents in jail, Andrew Jackson pursued a policy of genocide against this continent’s original inhabitants, and Abraham Lincoln unleashed...
Is the Ashcroft Justice Department busily engaged in shredding the Constitution under the cover of September 11? We are, the President tells us, at war, and in war, we are often told, the first casualty is civil liberties. Some feared that this was the case when Attorney General John Ashcroft, in July, unveiled his TIPS...
I do not like the word education—especially when it is not only confused with but mistaken for learning. Originally, education in English meant “bringing up.” That is not identical with schooling. A man or woman who “has been well brought up” (alas, an almost obsolete phrase nowadays) suggests something about good manners, mental or physical manners,...
Our nation is clearly in the midst of a culture war. The most important battles are not being fought in Washington, D.C., but in our media, churches, schools, civic organizations, youth groups, and universities. Western civilization, as we have known it, and America, as we have known it, are losing. Much of the time, the...
Belgrade’s Tenth Gymnasium was a well-proportioned neoclassical building in a leafy park three miles from the city center. Built by King Alexander shortly before his ill-fated trip to Marseilles, it bore his name until the Partisans’ victory in 1945 and was considered a very good secondary school. Many of its students came from the provinces...
“Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The real answer, which you would most certainly...
Is anyone who thinks, as I do, that “dim sum” is Chinese for “damn soon” or that “sushi” is Japanese for “bait” even remotely qualified to write on food? Actually, I often volunteer unsolicited comments, more or less printable, as the case may be. I have noticed that the most thoughtful people I know prefer...