Here’s a nice contrast. First, Rod : As Wendell Berry explains, especially in “Sex, the Economy, Freedom & Community,” you cannot have community without order, and you cannot have a workable order as long as both economic and sexual decisions are wholly privatized — that . . . . Continue Reading »
Don Rumsfeld has left us with the momentarily illuminating but ultimately distracting vision of Old Europe and New Europe, a distinction that divides geographically along the aftershadow of the Iron Curtain, with snooty/fuddy Western Europe versus freedom-appreciating/US-embracing Eastern Europe. . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m spending the morning (and now part of the afternoon) on one of those fancy buses that has an internet connection. Since I didn’t have the foresight to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica, I’ve got nothing better to do than read tomorrow’s New York Times, and to . . . . Continue Reading »
Roger Scruton’s written a book on beauty, in case you hadn’t heard. Here’s a nice little review, which frames the beauty question evocatively enough in terms of beauty’s relation, or antagonism, to kitsch. And so I ask: if beauty is the promise of happiness, is the problem . . . . Continue Reading »
Marc C. Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia, wants to “end the university as we know it.” But he wants to do it wrong: “The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex . . . . Continue Reading »
There is a compelling start of a conversation, I see, between Daniel Larison and Noah Millman . Noah began in reaction to Andrew Bacevich’s latest introduction to a book . Bacevich, of course, takes the anti-imperial position of William Appleman Williams to be a clarion wake-up call for any . . . . Continue Reading »
In the Emmy-winning 1997 version of Rebecca , there’s a scene in which the new, young Mrs. de Winter is harassed by one of the film’s less savory characters for claiming to enjoy being alone at the vast Manderlay estate while her husband is away on business. From our present-day . . . . Continue Reading »
Most excellently, “Spengler” — a.k.a. David Goldman — is blogging. Even more excellently, he’s blogging on a subject near to the heart, or at least the eye, of any reader of Rieff: the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Of the Christian Robert Spaemann, . . . . Continue Reading »
The way you hold your head, cursin’ God with every move Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it What are you tryin’ to prove Bob Dylan, Dead Man, Dead Man , 1981. Over at Front Porch Republic , Augustinian scholar James Matthew Wilson provides an important exegesis on . . . . Continue Reading »
It was my wife – really – who wanted to have a look at the Miss U.S.A. pageant on television last Sunday night. I obliged her just in time for us to catch the last round, in which five finalists (each more gorgeous than the last – in my wife’s, Julie’s view, that is — . . . . Continue Reading »
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