CATHOLICISMSA demographic question for Ross Douthat regarding his “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism” (January): If liberal Catholicism is to be alive in twenty years, where will its members come from? Who will be not just self-identifying to pollsters but running its schools and its . . . . Continue Reading »
On January 24, 1774, the young James Madison, twenty-two years old and two years out of Princeton, wrote an exasperated letter to his college friend William Bradford, who lived in Pennsylvania. In Virginia, Madison wrote, a season of intolerance had dawned. “That diabolical, hell-conceived . . . . Continue Reading »
During the debate over “biblical inerrancy” that raged among evangelicalism for several years in the late 1970s, I remember someone observing that Harold Lindsell’s 1976 book, The Battle for the Bible, which pretty much got that debate going, was more a theory of institutional change than it . . . . Continue Reading »
I‘ve been rereading T.S. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society. He wrote the book as World War II was beginning. It was a time when many were questioning whether liberal democratic societies had any future. Fascism and Communism seemed the vital new movements that had the upper hand. The gist of . . . . Continue Reading »
When it comes to equality, the rising generation of liberal leaders may talk the talk, but they’re unlikely to walk the walk. At least that’s what a new study recently published in Science suggests. Elite opinion among a younger, left-leaning cohort favors economic efficiency over equality, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Given the politically-correct hysteria that typically surrounds any discussion of racism these days, I hesitate to use the term. But it’s hard to find another that fits certain reactions to Synod-2015 from the port side of the Barque of Peter. Exhibit A: Shortly after the Synod concluded, the Web . . . . Continue Reading »
If Michael Walsh’s account of the rise of the “Unholy Left” in The Devil’s Pleasure Palaceis to be believed, the playbook for the contemporary fragmentation of American values was drawn up in Frankfurt by neo-Marxian philosophers in the years between the two World Wars.
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In what sense are all men created equal? America’s Declaration of Independence calls it a self-evident truth. But to look around the world, nothing could seem to be less the case, empirically speaking. Some of us are born to wealthy parents, others into poverty; some of us with 170 IQs, others a little slow on the uptake. The genetic lottery, as some call it, does not distribute prizes equally.
According to Gallup, less than one-third of the U.S. population describes itself as socially liberal. Yet in 2012, more than 95 percent of Ivy League faculty and employees who donated money to a presidential candidate did so to Obama. The same is true of employees at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Any . . . . Continue Reading »
Ben Carson might well profit from his presidential campaign, but his conservative supporters have already lost. They have lost by putting their hopes (and their money) in the wrong places. They would still have lost even if Carson had had no flaws as either a candidate or a man. Carson is a flawed . . . . Continue Reading »
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