About William Murchison

William Murchison is the Radford Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Baylor University. Mr. Murchison is a graduate of the University of Texas and Stanford University. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Human Life Review, First Things, Touchstone, and National Review.

Was Alexander Hamilton a Great Man?

By |2020-09-01T13:38:04-05:00February 5th, 2018|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, American Founding, Books, Forrest McDonald, History, Timeless Essays|

Forrest McDonald’s biography of Alexander Hamilton most likely will prove indispensable. What Hamilton thought, and how he came to think it, is nowhere else so plain as here. Alexander Hamilton: A Biography by Forrest McDonald (464 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., 1982) That Alexander Hamilton was among the most luminous and creative of the Founding Fathers every [...]

Was Alexander Hamilton a Great Man?

By |2020-07-10T14:58:18-05:00July 12th, 2015|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, Books, Featured, Forrest McDonald|

Forrest McDonald’s biography most likely will prove indispensable. What Alexander Hamilton thought, and how he came to think it, is nowhere else so plain as here. Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, by Forrest McDonald (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.) That Alexander Hamilton was among the most luminous and creative of the Founding Fathers every schoolboy [...]

Main Street U.S.A.: The Problem of Evil

By |2014-01-20T11:25:46-06:00December 21st, 2012|Categories: Christianity, Christmas, Presidency|

The notion of the president as comforter-in-chief fits snugly with the notion of political “solutions”—e.g., gun control—to essentially moral and theological problems—e.g., schoolhouse massacres. In a well-meant message of consolation, delivered Sunday at Newtown, President Obama declared that “These tragedies must end. And to end them we must change.” He again used the word “change,” [...]

Main Street U.S.A.: A Flip-Flops President

By |2014-01-22T17:10:12-06:00November 15th, 2012|Categories: Culture, Politics|

We mighta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, still-some-day-may elect a president serious about the matter of the nation’s freedoms. Or, possibly, not. The second possibility—so an ancient mariner reflects—arises from a sea change in our culture. It could be that more than half of us—a fast-rising proportion—don’t understand “serious” the way it was understood until half a [...]

The Limits of Free Speech: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?

By |2017-06-27T12:06:42-05:00March 7th, 2011|Categories: Politics|

William Muchison by William Murchison It fell to Justice Samuel Alito the other day to remind Americans how far their culture of liberation has veered from common sense and appreciation of the small decencies that undergird civilization. On a question of “free speech”—at its center a claimed right to begrime with taunts and [...]

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