Wilfred M. McClay

The blow to Christian egos may not be such a bad thing. Christians, particularly those in the West who are heirs to many centuries of political and cultural dominance, must learn to contend with shrinking influence and growing marginalization, even vilification, where they once enjoyed a high, even . . . . Continue Reading »

“Liberalism After Liberalism” is one of three addresses given to a symposium on “After Liberalism,” put on in late February with the support of the Simon/Hertog Fund for Policy Analysis and of Fieldstead and Company. Yuval Levin and James Rogers responded to this paper. The other two . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not the kind of road you ever want to find yourself driving on in a hard rain or at night—or, if you are seriously acrophobic, at any time at all. To get to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, you must drive about an hour north of Santa Fe, past the tiny town of Abiquiu and the places . . . . Continue Reading »

Works of social criticism often do not wear well, and even the best of them tend to fade in interest by their fiftieth birthday. Either the tools of analysis change, or the conditions being analyzed, and very often both. Once-essential works become strictly historical documents, artifacts giving . . . . Continue Reading »

I cannot claim to have known the late Irving Kristol very well. But each encounter was memorable, and none more so than the last, in May of 2009. It was at a crowded and noisy reception at the Warner Theater, prior to Leon Kass’ presentation of the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National . . . . Continue Reading »

In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents , Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he continued, it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss . . . . Continue Reading »

It is odd that in the many recent discussions about what it might mean to pursue a more self-consciously “Christian” approach to scholarship, debates that were given fresh urgency over a decade ago by George Marsden’s book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship , the name of . . . . Continue Reading »

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor New York Review Books, 112 pages, $12.95 paper One of the most memorable films of the decade was also one of the most countercultural: Philip Gröning’s 2005 Into Great Silence . This severely unadorned, unnarrated, and unsoundtracked . . . . Continue Reading »

To Empower People: From State to Civil Society Twentieth Anniversary ­Edition by Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger American Enterprise Institute, 244 pages, $25 Because Richard John Neuhaus was so prolific, and his interests were so amazingly broad and diverse, even his most devoted . . . . Continue Reading »

We have a chronic problem in America with abstract words. We cannot do without them, since they are carriers of our highest ideals and aspirations: “justice,” “democracy,” “dignity,” “liberty.” But it is for precisely this reason that we should beware of them, . . . . Continue Reading »