The most moving spiritual experience I’ve had in the past decade didn’t take place in the pews of my synagogue. It did not involve a rabbi, or reading from the Torah, and I wasn’t wearing my yarmulke or my prayer shawl. Instead, I was hunched over on a stationary bike in the dark, sweating . . . . Continue Reading »
Wokeism in Court I should begin by congratulating Frank Resartus on his excellent essay “Defeating the Equity Regime” (May). Resartus believes “conventional right-wing jurisprudence” on “just a handful of constitutional questions” could “defeat the [equity] regime altogether.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Parental authority has been an issue of lively and often bitter public debate over the past two centuries, and it seems likely to play a significant role in the 2022 elections and beyond. As I write, a lead story in the Washington Post features a new nationwide organization called “Moms . . . . Continue Reading »
Most Christians misunderstand the relationship of poetry to their faith. They consider it an admirable but minor aspect of religious practice—elegant verbal decoration in honor of the divine. They recognize poetry’s place in worship. Congregations need hymns, and the Psalms should be . . . . Continue Reading »
After almost a century, what fruit has the conservative distinction between nature and history yielded? Many conservatives today gather in the shade of the tree grown by Leo Strauss, who concluded that because modern man had abandoned nature and been seduced by history, all things—including . . . . Continue Reading »
American conservatism has been a remarkably unstable thing since the end of the Cold War. Twenty years ago, the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush and the hawkish foreign-policy views of the neoconservatives were ascendant. A little less than ten years ago, the right was supposedly . . . . Continue Reading »
No, not the masks you assume I have in mind, the masks that have become such a bone of contention in our society. The masks I have in mind are the kind referred to by C. S. Lewis in a passage from his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Discussing his experience as a soldier in the Great War, he . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty years after publishing his first novel—years he spent establishing himself, in incisive, often fearsome essays and reviews and nonfiction books, as a leading literary–cultural critic—Pankaj Mishra had a Damascene moment of sorts. He describes it in a recent essay for . . . . Continue Reading »
Not very long ago, an eminent British editor tweeted an article from his own publication showing (he said) that “in the Middle Ages, some 100,000 women over Europe were burned, hanged, drowned, or put to death in other ingenious ways on suspicion of being witches.” “Three centuries of . . . . Continue Reading »
What is a human person? The question runs through all of recorded history, a puzzle for philosophers and poets, a challenge that each society has answered in its own distinctive way. Are we spirits or animals or somehow both? Are we mortal or immortal? Are we free, rational, choosing beings, . . . . Continue Reading »
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