Imagining the Epiphany

By |2024-01-05T18:33:03-06:00January 5th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Death, Epiphany, John Willson, Literature, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|

The late Steve Masty’s “The Test of the Magi” is a novel that displays a powerful religious imagination and a profound knowledge of the history and cultures of the ancient world, as well as personal experience with the geography and anthropology of the middle east. The Test of the Magi, by Johannes Bergmann (254 pages, [...]

Books That Make Us Human

By |2022-10-31T15:42:00-05:00October 12th, 2022|Categories: Books, Books that Make Us Human, Conservatism, John Willson, Literature, Pope Benedict XVI, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

This is a quirky list. I sit here with tattered old books, some new ones, and my Kindle, and love them all; and offer ten that I have read in the years since my retirement from full-time teaching. Each has given me joy, and each speaks to what Brad Birzer calls the “human condition.” Booth [...]

Tools: Work Done Right

By |2022-08-03T17:24:10-05:00August 3rd, 2022|Categories: Books, History, John Willson, Labor/Work, Timeless Essays|

Tools are a significant part of the permanent things, but they are also relative to time, place, and function. That is, we are tool-using animals, whether it is a flint-edged knife, or the one supposedly developed by Jim Bowie, or the Swiss Army knife. Or to put it another way, we are an ingenious species, [...]

Do We Really Understand What an Economy Is?

By |2021-06-24T11:34:40-05:00June 24th, 2021|Categories: Economics, Essential, Faith, Family, Featured, Forrest McDonald, John Willson, Labor/Work, Timeless Essays|

It is up to our “little platoons” to restore the respect for work that alone can restore health to an economic order. It is a long road, but a good start on going down the that road is to read carefully our historians and poets. M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets: [...]

Progressivism, School Safety, and Common Sense

By |2018-03-15T01:01:07-05:00March 14th, 2018|Categories: 2nd Amendment, Culture, Education, John Willson, Politics|

There is something uniquely awful about children getting gunned down. But in terms of school security, the good news is that we are still free enough to use existing laws and institutions to experiment in states and local communities, in government and private schools, to see what works… One principle that should unite all serious [...]

An Imaginative Conservative’s “Man of the House”

By |2017-05-17T23:27:21-05:00May 17th, 2017|Categories: Books, C. R. Wiley, Family, John Willson, Virtue|

The theme of C.R. Wiley’s “Man of the House” is that the Great Progressive Fallacy—the individual is the moral center of the culture, and that the state is the individual’s protector—serves only the forces of destruction… Man of the House: A Handbook for Building a Shelter that will Last in a World that is Falling [...]

What Do Conservatives Do with Donald Trump Now?

By |2021-01-06T18:10:31-06:00May 4th, 2016|Categories: Donald Trump, Forrest McDonald, John Willson, Politics, Presidency, Republicans|

Donald Trump has felt the pulse of the people and taken into account the meaning (and limits) of the Constitution and come up with the outlines of a plan that is both reasonably coherent and (dare I say?) conservative. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” —Sun-tzu, ca. 400 BC; or Machiavelli, 1520 AD [...]

Poverty & the Pursuit of Happiness: Arthur Brooks’ “Conservative Heart”

By |2015-12-04T08:07:09-06:00November 17th, 2015|Categories: Books, Featured, Happiness, John Willson, Modernity|

The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, by Arthur C. Brooks (Broadside Books, 2015) The great Elton Trueblood, who really did write about happiness, said many times that you can write a book of any length, but if you want people to read it, make it around 100 pages. [...]

Uncle Put & the American Paradox of Individualism & Community

By |2019-07-03T13:39:12-05:00November 13th, 2015|Categories: American Republic, Featured, History, John Willson, Literature|

The last clear memory I have of my great-uncle Atwood Putnam (yes, his ancestors were those Putnams, including “Old Wolf” Israel, but we never got any of the money—well, more about that later) was of him chasing several of his great-grandchildren down the gravel driveway that led to his shack, barefoot, floppy red felt hat [...]

Great and Not-So-Great Society

By |2021-08-26T14:36:27-05:00May 31st, 2014|Categories: Featured, John Willson, Politics, Presidency|

Lyndon Baines Johnson was about as politically and morally corrupt as anyone who has served in the highest office in the republic, and he was intellectually ill-prepared to be the leader of a coherent liberal or progressive vision for America. Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics. Ambrose Bierce, The [...]

Forever Young: Kent State, “Ohio”

By |2014-05-24T10:04:52-05:00May 14th, 2014|Categories: John Willson, Politics, Tyranny|

Glenn Frank One of our great cultural temptations since the 1960s is to think of songsters as poets. Stephen Foster never claimed to be, nor did Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, or Oscar Hammerstein. Suddenly, in the 60s, the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, David Crosby and (slightly later) Bruce Springsteen moved up [...]

Gerhart Niemeyer, Refugee

By |2017-12-09T13:26:15-06:00January 30th, 2014|Categories: Christianity, Gerhart Niemeyer, John Willson, World War II|

Brad Birzer was thinking, the other day, about intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. He asked me if I knew Gerhart Niemeyer’s story. I told him that I do, from Gerhart’s son Paul’s loving and very competent biography of [...]

Football: Bastion of the Republic

By |2014-09-22T14:02:35-05:00December 23rd, 2013|Categories: Culture, John Willson, Sports|

I came across this the other day, from the Washington Times: Kids flee football in light of NFL violence, Pop Warner participation plummeting. The author is Nathan Fenno, and I hasten to say that I am the last man in the world to wish to kill the messenger. His article is on the whole fair, although [...]

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