In its modern sense, the concept of human rights could be said to be alien to the Islamic tradition. That is because the modern doctrine of rights is an invention of the European Enlightenment. It was an attempt to base the humane social order on reason rather than revelation. Unfortunately the secular foundations of the [...]
Michael O’Brien’s “A Landscape with Dragons” is a study of the shaping of a child’s imagination. More than that, it’s an exploration of how stories and their use of images and universal symbols shape a child’s spiritual sensitivity and moral compass. A waist-high stack of liquor boxes runs the length of my dining room wall. [...]
The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity, by Gene Sperling The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman In the 1970s, the Republican Party was known by another nickname than the Grand Old Party. It was also known as “the tax collector of the welfare state.” Hard as it may be for [...]
The American Myth of Religious Freedom, by Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr. This book provides a good example of the distortion of reality, not to mention mind-torturing confusion, that occurs when political documents—in this instance, the religious clauses of the First Amendment and the writings of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison—are viewed through sectarian glasses and without [...]
Admittedly, I am more frequently found beside a small glass of madeira in the club library (preferably a Great War-era Terrantez, or the rum-based Buals which are now getting equally hard to find). But I jumped at the chance to actually meet the members of my favourite pop-band while they tour England. Okay, so [...]
A huge “thank you” to the members of APL for inviting me to speak this morning. A special thanks to Mike Federici for chairing and to the other panel members. I’ve been corresponding with Dan McCarthy and Mike Church for several years now, but this is the first time we’ve ever actually encountered one another [...]
John Dickinson’s standing in the American pantheon is shamefully obscure in view of his contributions toward the establishment of an independent regime of limited government, federalism, and liberty under law. Having studied eighteenth-century America all our adult lives, we are prepared to offer a generalization: the more one learns about the subject, the less prone [...]
Education is in crisis not because standards of literacy or mathematics have fallen, but because we have no coherent vision, as a society, of what education is for or what it is meant to achieve. We have assumed that, if it is not merely a cage to keep our young people off the streets, its [...]
Before all the noise, bizarre theories, revisionists approaches, and misinterpretations of Western Civilization there was a brilliant and dedicated scholar who carefully studied primary documents and a range of cultural and social artifacts. His research and passion yielded much fruit, and in his day, Christopher Dawson was recognized as a world class cultural historian. Then [...]
At the beginning of his epic poem, “The Ballad of the White Horse,” one of the two greatest Christian apologists of the previous century speculatively proclaimed: For the end of the world was long ago And all we dwell today As children of some second birth Like a strange people left on earth After a [...]
So, the splendid old gent is finally retiring. I knew him briefly some quarter-century ago when he was merely old; now he is 94 and trading an enchanted mountain paradise in the former princely state of Chitral for the hot, Punjabi flatlands down-country. Major Geoffrey Langlands began teaching in England in 1936, the year in [...]
Since this lecture is a labor of love, I shall not scruple to enhance its legitimacy by adducing documentary proof that there exists an old tradition of offering transatlantic tributes to Jane Austen. In 1852 a female member of the distinguished Quincy family of Boston wrote as follows to one of Jane Austen’s naval brothers, [...]
This line was supposed to be flat. Euro-dollar exchange rate. Spain is now in recession. Greece is bracing for elections, as is France, which could unleash class warfare. Austerity, low growth rates, and debt stalk the continent. The place caught such a cold that even the United Kingdom is not immune, slipping now [...]
A Hot Humid Day in South Bend On July 24, 2008, Rush finished its “Snakes and Arrows” tour with a concert in Indianapolis. I was researching that day at Notre Dame, and I could easily have made the 1.5-hour trip south to see them. For lots of reason (none of which I remember very well [...]