I enjoyed a very pleasant though sadly short visit to my former hometown. It was mid-April. The weather was mild, and Aeolus welcomed me with soft breezes rather than the usual rough winds of the Great Plains. The redbud trees were radiantly abloom in the spring sunshine. I had coffee with old . . . . Continue Reading »
Death has a way of focusing the mind on the transcendent. It helped set off America’s First Great Awakening. In April 1734, the little community of Pascommuck, three miles outside Northampton, Massachusetts, suffered what Jonathan Edwards recalled as the “very sudden and awful death of a young . . . . Continue Reading »
Abortion is devastating the black community. Continue Reading »
For many years, apart from sporadic eruptions in American society, the issue of race has played Banquo’s ghost at the American evangelical banquet: an unsettling, unwelcome, somewhat passive guest. But recent trends in American public opinion, fueled by reports of police violence, have made race . . . . Continue Reading »
The unrest that erupted in late May 2020 started in Minneapolis, my hometown, with the death of George Floyd in police custody. In the protests and riots that followed, Black Lives Matter and Antifa were the shock troops, “police brutality” the rallying cry. It seemed at first an uprising from . . . . Continue Reading »
The trial of the Chicago Seven was an important step on the way to abandoning evidence-based arguments in favor of emotive appeals. Continue Reading »
Catesby Leigh notes in his essay “Monumental Contrast” (October) that the removal of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in New York City is a sign that the “monumental aesthetic” in public art is an “endangered species.” Those of us in the art world know only too well that in civic art the . . . . Continue Reading »
In November 2019, a controversy broke out at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory. The plenary lecture, delivered by Hunter College professor Philip Ewell, alleged the existence of elitism, color blindness, Eurocentrism, racism, and xenophobia in the field of music theory in North . . . . Continue Reading »
Nineteenth-century France was the scene of bitter cultural and political conflict. The German invasion in 1870 inflicted a humiliating defeat on the French army. As the Germans put Paris under siege, the Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed. Radical anti-Catholic leftists took control of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Having fallen away from both Christianity and American civil religion, liberals in the United States are looking for something to believe in. The death of George Floyd on May 25 occasioned a religious awakening. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Americans took to the streets by the tens and hundreds . . . . Continue Reading »
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