Not so long ago, liberal opinion was smitten with Silicon Valley’s “disruptive” agenda. Pundits, journalists, and officials all proclaimed the democratizing power of digital platforms, which they saw (dubiously) as the force behind the Arab Spring. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton placed . . . . Continue Reading »
Iranian rule has come to an end in the country of Iran!” So declared Persia’s chief Zoroastrian priest, Adurbad-i Emedan, roughly a thousand years ago. Arab armies flying the banner of Allah had checkmated the Sasanian dynasty four centuries earlier. In a.d. 651, the last Sasanian monarch, . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council adopted Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. With this document, the Church sought to address “the whole of humanity.” In a way, this aspiration was not surprising. Christian doctrine holds that Christ died for the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Ur-Bororo are the most boring people in the world. Their entire population, which is not large, lives in “dwelling sheds,” rectangular clapboard houses in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Other jungle tribes tend to decorate their bodies with elaborate tattoos, lip plugs, or ritual . . . . Continue Reading »
It seems only a few years ago that I was calling myself “a man of the left.” Well, like the Jewish intellectuals who became “neoconservatives” in the 1960s and 1970s, I am a liberal who’s been “mugged by reality.” What has happened to the public discourse about race in this country . . . . Continue Reading »
America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, . . . . Continue Reading »
Solzhenitsyn famously defined the principal trait of the twentieth century in four words: “Men have forgotten God.” So far, the twenty-first century might be summarized in six: Men are at war with God. Awakened from agnostic slumber by new forms of temptation, chiefly the sexual revolution, . . . . Continue Reading »
I write in defense of memory. Not Memory in her gaudy mythological form, the Titan goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses—but memory as the glue that holds our lives together and imposes order and continuity amid the blooming buzzing confusion of sensations, thoughts, and activities that . . . . Continue Reading »
She is already what she will become.In crimson cape, her neck pierced by a sword,she holds the palm of peace and martyrdom— both suffering and glory, her reward. The striking textile pattern, a rosette, recurs in hues of amethyst and jade, suggesting jewels, perhaps an amulet for Christians. . . . . Continue Reading »
Truth is truth wherever it is found, In light-struck windowed hands of opal glass, In pebbles left in homage on a grave, In fingers shelling mounds of lady peas, In radiance that roosts inside the soul, In paint, in words, in whirling steps, in steel, In “rings of fire” as infant heads are . . . . Continue Reading »
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