It’s rare to see a book utterly miss its target. When it purports to expose a mortal threat to our Republic, it’s a rather astonishing achievement. But Sean Faircloth has done it in his Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It . The . . . . Continue Reading »
In the past couple of weeks, several articles have quoted Christian activist David Lane quoting my Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective , most recently here . The most damning thing from my book seems to be this: “Americanists cannot break Babelic or bestial . . . . Continue Reading »
Americans like to remind ourselves of Crevecoeur’s letters concerning America. Like Tocqueville, he initially saw the American as virtually a new human species, breaking away from the European past. “This great metamorphosis,” he wrote, “extinguishes all his European . . . . Continue Reading »
Powell ( The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation ) argues that the American system is largely a product of Enlightenment liberalism, embodying many of the features of the ideal Enlightened polities constructed by Locke, Montesquieu and others. He recognizes . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review . According to Jill Lepore ( The New Yorker ), the article proposed that “there exists a legal right to be let alone - a right that had never been defined before.” It was . . . . Continue Reading »
What makes the United States ” one nation “? I offer some thoughts at Firstthings.com this morning. . . . . Continue Reading »
What is an American? Twenty years ago, Garry Wills ( John Wayne’s America ) answered that the “archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killed cleansing the world of . . . . Continue Reading »
Prior to the founding of America, argues Hannah Arendt in On Revolution , political orders were justified and legitimated by appeal to absolutes: “a divinity, not nature but nature’s God, not reason but a divinely informed reason” gave validity to political order and buttressed . . . . Continue Reading »
In their contribution to American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States , John Agnew and Joanne Sharp describe the context and import of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famed “Frontier Thesis.” Turner wrote in the context of the downturn of the 1890s, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Users of LSD during the 60s were not just out for a joy ride. They were the vanguard of a new race. Jay Stevens says ( Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream , xiii-xiv): “the hippies were an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration.” He . . . . Continue Reading »
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