Culture
Blogs are a marker of a new elite. More accurately, they represent one area in which the ways society works around elite structures must be reconceived. That’s the central theme with which I approached the annual professional development seminar of the Legislative Information and Communications Staff Section (LINCS) of the National Conference of State Legislatures…
David Wilcox and Nance Pettit’s new CD, Out Beyond Ideas, puts to music mystic poetry from multiple religious traditions. My review, of sorts, suggests that they’ve uncovered and enhanced commonalities that underlie human societies, and that conservatives should look past the too-obvious backstory of the project to commonalities that ought to underlie our own.
My latest FactIs column, “When Plan B Becomes Plan A,” suggests that something is awry when a drug that requires a prescription for low concentrations is on track for over-the-counter status in higher concentrations. Of course, Plan B is a “birth control” pill; such does sex — and the consequences thereof — skew Western minds.
This posting continues a conversation begun with the previous posting entitled Religious Without Being Morally Serious Vs. Morally Serious Without Being Religious. Rather than the canard of there being some remnant trying to establish a theocracy in America, I would suggest there is a different dynamic going on. The culture war led by the secular…
It’s saddening to admit that I finished reading Minette Marrin’s “Confronted with our own decadence,” in the London Times, with a mordant smirk. I recall, just about four years ago, having the very thought with which she ends: Despite all this, I do, now for the first time, feel a faint glimmer of optimism. One…
“Breaking the Glass Taboo,” my latest column for TheFactIs.org, responds to Providence Journal editorialist M.J. Anderson’s nostalgia for the days of the Baby Boomers’ youth and to recent research finding that removing men from the home can be part of a recipe for creating “exceptional” boys. I didn’t go into this in my column, but…
My latest column for TheFactIs.org — “Reasoning with the Id” — responds to a recent piece by Lee Harris. To summarize too drastically, Harris seeks to find a place for tradition in a world of reason. Me, I think is more accurate to stress that rationality already exists in a world of tradition.
I recently read Michael Barone’s book entitled Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future. It is well worth reading. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book: For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to…
I rarely agree with Froma Harrop’s politics but she has a very perceptive editorial on what makes long-term marriages happen: You know the quip: A wife is asked on her silver anniversary whether she has ever contemplated divorce. “Divorce, never,” she replies. “Murder, frequently.” That sums up the truth about long-term marriages. Their success doesn’t…
I am hosting History Carnival #10 at Spinning Clio this week. The History Carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of blog posts that deal with history with the goal of giving the general public an idea of what historians and others are thinking about history and how they are applying it to contemporary matters. There is…
