Mark Bauerlein

Upon its release fifteen years ago, the distributors of The Blair Witch Project realized they had a phenomenon in hand. An innovative marketing campaign had built interest in the film by leading people to websites displaying fake news stories and information about the witch and the killings. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund has sent out an email message about the upcoming election from Lena Dunham, creator and star of Girls, author of Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned, and representative Twenty-First-Century Young American Female. Indeed, a recent New York Timesprofile termed her book “a primer for millennial women negotiating the path to adulthood,” so we should examine her words closely when she drifts away from the youth habit of talking about her life and shifts to politics. Continue Reading »

We can’t go out into the streets and do evangelism and tell them what the gospel is, but we can show it.” So said Canon Andrew White last week addressing a small group of local Christians in New York City. A couple of days earlier, he gave the opening prayer in the U. S. Senate, which you can watch at C-SPAN. Continue Reading »

As students head back to college this month, many have yet to choose a major. When they do decide, they should keep a wide divergence in mind. It appeared awhile back in a headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Business and Academic Leaders Disagree on Quality of College Grads.” The disagreement emerged in two polls by Gallup, one for Lumina that asked Americans, including business leaders, about the cost and quality of higher education, the other for Inside Higher Ed that queried academic officers about the academic health of their campuses. Continue Reading »

The motives for tattoos are many, but they all have a common subtext. A tattoo can mark a group identity—sailors, soldiers, inmates, gangs, motorcyclists. It can memorialize a person or event, as in a virtual archive of snapshots of tattoos showing names and faces of deceased loved ones (I attended a presentation of the archive by two academics in Toronto last year). Sometimes they happen by blunt peer pressure, a set of 20-year-olds on Saturday night getting drunk, knowing not what to do until one of them blurts, “Let’s go get a tat and a ring!” (a good friend tells me of pulling out just as his turn came up). Continue Reading »

Ever since the 1965 Moynihan Report on “The Negro Family,” the rate of children born in African-American homes without fathers has been a key statistic in social science discussions and policy debates. Back then, it was 25 percent. Today, it’s 70 percent, a rate extraordinary enough to have become a standard citation in discussions ranging from rap music to African-American test scores to Ferguson, Missouri. Continue Reading »

After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Hobby Lobby decision in late-June, the Boston Globe printed an editorial under a regretful header: “Supreme Court loses its way in vague contraceptive decision.” Continue Reading »

Rusty Reno’s treatment of the Ferguson affair in his Web Exclusive today emphasizes the predictable “script” that has unfolded since that fateful confrontation on August 9th. “Black youth shot by policeman [arrow] outrage and protest [arrow] rioting and looting [arrow] indignant and solemn discussion of American racism by pundits and columnists”—that’s the drama, and it surprises nobody anymore. Continue Reading »

A funny thing happened when Michael Novak brought Herbert Marcuse to lecture to his students. It was the early-1970s when campus rebellion had entered its darker phase, and Marcuse was an idol of the Movement. His theory of “repressive tolerance” served as an essential touchstone for protest, and his volatile mix of Marx and Freud seemed an edgy, relevant style of intellectualized activism. Continue Reading »

One of the more intractable aspects of sexual politics today for traditionalists is the emergence of the courtroom as the arena for settling every debate. Even when they have a democratic majority, not to mention centuries of sexual-marital mores, on their side, the contrary will of one-to-five politically-appointed individuals can prevail. Of course, judicial activism is an old problem, undemocratic and arbitrary, placing monumental decisions in too few hands. But there is another problem, an indirect one that follows precisely from critics taking seriously the courtroom’s power. We could call this problem the “legalization” of debate, meaning not whether something is legal, but instead the conversion of moral, social, religious, and other dimensions of an issue into legal, or legalistic, terms, or at least the neglect of them because of a focus on what the judges will say.

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