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Slippery Slopes

The Canadian government, with its leaders, functionaries, and even its medical acolytes, may well deserve to be charged with crimes against humanity. I am not speaking about crimes done against indigenous peoples, a different area of moral and judicial concern. I have in mind another set of crimes, . . . . Continue Reading »

Get Real

In the mid-1980s, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth ­Anscombe drew up a syllabus of errors, which she delivered—rather appropriately—in Rome, to a group of moral theologians. Her syllabus consisted of twenty theses, commonly held by her fellow analytic philosophers, that she deemed . . . . Continue Reading »

MacIntyre in Retreat

He lived, he worked, he died.” Heidegger’s famously terse summary of Aristotle’s life expresses one common view of the project of intellectual biography. An opposed view holds that every thinker’s work is a disguised confession—a translation into the abstract language of thought, of . . . . Continue Reading »

Anatomy of a Cancellation

It all began at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando on Halloween 2021. I spoke on family decline and what to do about it. For generations, conservatives have tried to promote the interests of families while respecting the goals of feminists and sexual liberationists. “Compassionate . . . . Continue Reading »

Fun Trumps Fear

What to make of the midterm elections? You may, if you wish, lend your ear to the ululations of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, who are eager to tell you that the mythical Red Wave failed to materialize because of Donald Trump, or because of Dobbs, or because of January 6th, . . . . Continue Reading »

Grace and Serendipity

When you’re a linguist, you get used to being asked how ­many languages you speak. But a few years ago I was asked for the first time, by a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, what my favorite words are. “Grace and serendipity,” I blurted out—not a graceful response, but a . . . . Continue Reading »

From Mecca to Rome

Joseph Fadelle was born in Iraq in the 1960s. During his mandatory service in the Iraqi army, he was assigned a Christian roommate. Initially distraught to be rooming with an infidel, he came to understand that God had given him the mission of converting this man to Islam. In challenging the man’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

Bill Gates and Work Sam Kriss’s takedown of Bill Gates, and of money generally, is a provocative and thoughtful piece (“The Truth About Bill Gates,” November 2022), but more than once while reading it I felt sorry for Kriss. His understanding of work has a depressing every-man-for-himself . . . . Continue Reading »

The Progressive Scarlett O'Hara

In the summer of 2020, HBO removed Gone with the Wind (1939) from its streaming service. The move came in response to an op-ed by John Ridley, screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave (2013), which charged that the film “glorifies the antebellum south,” “romanticizes the . . . . Continue Reading »

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