Russell Kirk was haunted by the past. Ghosts prowled his house, peering through windows, moving furniture, startling guests. Far from resenting these presences, Kirk welcomed them. For he regarded society as “a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn.” He propounded this . . . . Continue Reading »
I am in a 1982 Volvo, headed north on I-5 toward Oceanside, at a pace I could easily beat on a bicycle. A universe of cars spreads to the north and the south. Twenty-five miles, on a five-lane freeway, will take an hour or more. How can people live like this? The ordeal of rush hour in Southern . . . . Continue Reading »
When my wife and I moved away from the Midwest some fifteen years ago, we began an age of perpetual homesickness. I’d tear up at the sight of Notre Dame’s stadium on Saturday football broadcasts, recalling our years in South Bend where I did my graduate studies, only just ended. I watched every . . . . Continue Reading »
When he was a young social worker in St. Louis, Roger Baldwin was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who later published more books in defense of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Maoists than any other English-speaking author and ended up buried in a revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery in . . . . Continue Reading »
In 2016, Kaeley McEvoy was a student at New York’s Union Theological Seminary and a ministry intern at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square. She hadn’t expected to get pregnant; a long-acting contraceptive implant was supposed to have prevented it. But the pink line on the plastic test . . . . Continue Reading »
Marie de Vignerot, the Duchess of Aiguillon, outmaneuvered popes and overawed princes; she counseled kings and steered the state; she managed and invested a colossal fortune, with which she raised hospitals, freed slaves, and flung missions to the far corners of the earth; she negotiated treaties, . . . . Continue Reading »
The sexual revolution began not with the Boomers but with their elders. How would it have been possible, after all, had not biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903–1967), a member of the Greatest Generation, followed the advice of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) to stop experimenting with rabbits and . . . . Continue Reading »
C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity famously begins with vignettes of ordinary experience. People of all ages and levels of education, Lewis observes, often say things like: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?” “That’s my seat, I was there first,” “Leave him . . . . Continue Reading »
In the annals of quixotic American presidential runs, the candidacy of Cornel West—the seventy-year-old academic, social critic, and activist—for the 2024 election is among the more fantastic. Though Americans have shown a willingness to vote for politically inexperienced candidates so . . . . Continue Reading »
In July 1944, when my paternal grandfather was a little younger than I am now, he witnessed the near-destruction by Allied bombers and artillery of the old city of Caen, in Normandy. At that point he had been a soldier for six years and had seen some brutal action during the initial landings in . . . . Continue Reading »
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