Archive

Not long after the Civil War, John Wesley Work, an African American church choir director and scholar in Nashville, Tennessee, realized that the rising generation of black southerners might...

Yuval Levin has done a great service by showing how nostalgia blinds. And that malady affects both the left and the right in America today. The truth is, usually, that...

George Will argues that American politics is divided between conservatives, “who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom” and progressives “whose...

I just got back from giving a lecture at a small liberal-arts college. The tenured professors were complaining. (That, after all, is allegedly what tenure gives professors the unlimited...

An author in the Harvard Crimson has sparked a controversy by arguing that academic freedom should give way to academic justice. We shouldn’t tolerate professors, visiting speakers, or even students...

Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar acceptance speech began, to the uncomfortable astonishment of the audience, with his looking heavenward to acknowledge God and his dad, a working-class southern guy who is...

Years ago, I went twice to the snake-handling Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia—about twenty miles from where I live. It wasn’t my unbounded personal curiosity...

I wrote a small appreciation of the show Downton Abbey as using nostalgia astutely as a way of showing us the strengths and weaknesses of aristocracy. Aristocrats had relational virtues—a clear sense...

Now I’ve gotten several emails, two from leading Catholic American thinkers, telling me, in the words of one, that Patrick Deneen “hit me below the belt” in some essay...

Over the last year or so, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to critics of American higher education. The best ones are from a “disruptive” or libertarian point...

Many conservatives say that those darn progressives are making our country more collectivist. And one result is the growing culture of dependency. We’re getting further and further down that...

One difference between postmodern conservatives and other contributors to First Thoughts has to do with being influenced by Leo Strauss. Each pomoncon can speak for himself (or herself). But...

So I’ve gotten a fairly gratifying number of confused and disgruntled emails this afternoon about the disappearance of the blog devoted to postmodern conservatism. There’s been a change I...

So in coming up with a post for MLK Day, I can do no better than quoting from one of our super-threaders—C.J. Wolfe: I agree about the point on...

big thoughts here on race, family, and song.