As part of the research for a book that I am writing on civic education, I recently interviewed Dr. Matthew Spalding, the dean of the Van Andel School of Government of Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian institution that has supplied much of the intellectual heft for the war against “woke” education. I wanted to talk…
A few years before his death, Zbigniew Herbert, the prominent Polish poet, published a slim volume of nineteen poems titled Elegy for the Departure. Many of the poems had a clearly valedictory theme. The title poem, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp,” is particularly significant: it seems to announce the end of…
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the moment he realized that he did not really believe what he had always professed. It happened during a conversation with another zek, or prisoner, named Boris Gammerov, a “yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face.” After exchanging biographies they passed to politics. Gammerov “began to question…
Recent reports in The New York Times and the Guardian have noted that at least one-quarter of Gen-Zers believe in the idea that you can attract the things you want — luck, money, love, anything you want — by repeating certain mantras. The practice is called “manifesting.” Most of these believers are devoted adepts of…
On December 8, 2015, French President François Hollande announced plans to posthumously award the Legion of Honour to the one hundred and thirty victims of the terrorist attacks of November 13 at the Bataclan concert hall and the surrounding area. The institution’s Grand Chancellor disagreed. Since its creation on May 19, 1802, by Napoléon Bonaparte,…
for Cassandre Berdoz Cassandra does not sing the fall of Troy, where Little Ajax raped her in the sanctuary. She does not sing her slaughter by Clytemnestra while Agamemnon beat his fists on the ground. From the tower of the Cathedral called Notre Dame, what Cassandra sings is the passage of time. She sings the…
It was just a B-grade submarine movie (or maybe all sub movies are B-grade), a vehicle for John Wayne, whose drawling virility I always resent, while Patricia Neal plays his ex-wife, though off-screen her lover Gary Cooper visited the set to try to persuade her to abort their fetus. And after all the khaki, depth…
For years I lived on the mountain, but I never drank from the high stream where it flashes over gray scree on its way down to the valley after percolating through the glacier that holds grains of carbon and pollen, maize and grasses, smoke, plague and famine, spores of fungus on the manure of cattle,…
It was almost vulgar the way that it was just so pronounced, how innocent they were. —photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 3.15.22 On the front page of the newspaper this morning, there was a photograph of a mother and her children killed by a Russian mortar round as they tried to flee across a ruined bridge. They…
The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old…
For Mario Vargas Llosa, a prince of our liberalism. With one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train For many decades I have participated like a good soldier in the war of ideas, by which I mean the application of philosophical notions to public affairs for the purpose of persuading readers…
The writer responsible for Job is the greatest of all biblical poets and one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world. He is a technical virtuoso, deftly marshaling sound and rhythm for expressive effects, at times deploying brilliant word-play — as when he writes, “My days are…
