When we come to measure the success of a presidency, it matters a great deal whether the administration in question made life better or worse for the poor. A culture whose values spring from Judaism, Christianity, and a compassionate humanism cannot be satisfied unless the poor are well cared for. . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Lasch has written a “loose, baggy monster” of a hook. He takes on nothing less than “the western human condition,” arguing determinedly and, to my mind, persuasively that the idea of progress has outgrown its time. Lasch even suggests that progress, as the West has encoded it, . . . . Continue Reading »
In a moment of exasperation, the novelist Flannery O'Connor wrote to a friend that the motto of the Catholic Church could be: We Guarantee to Corrupt Nothing But Your Taste. O'Connor's remark was penned before the impact of the Second Vatican Council was felt by American Catholics, and anyone alert . . . . Continue Reading »
We are nearly two years into the post-Cold War era—an era as yet without a name—and we have awakened to the sobering reality that democracy is easier to desire than it is to sustain. The painful experiences of nations as disparate as Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua, South Africa, and the . . . . Continue Reading »
Driven by the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, foreign perceptions of China are now being reexamined in a manner reminiscent of earlier foreign perceptions of the Soviet Union. In the early 1930s, millions of people died of famine in the Ukraine and North Caucasus. Walter Duranty, the New . . . . Continue Reading »
In our March issue, George Weigel offered a comprehensive, incisive, and, it must be admitted, devastating examination of “The Churches and War in the Gulf.” In times of war, it has been said, truth is the first casualty. There is something to that. But times of great national moment can . . . . Continue Reading »
It is nothing new for poets, painters, and philosophers to harken back to Utopian “golden ages” when greatness or harmony flourished. The German Romantics were inspired by the ancient Greeks. The British Romantics longed for the pastoral beauty of pre-industrial times. The American . . . . Continue Reading »
“Sherman Led by Victory” Is a St. Gaudens statue, A cast-bronze allegory. With Victory as a woman Pulling his horse’s bridle Out of a sculptor’s stable. Leading him off the pedestal Into a bronze fable. I used to think Sherman A beautiful . . . . Continue Reading »
From time to time, a most unlikely book strikes the public imagination and becomes something of a best seller. A case in point is Donald Kagan’s Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (Free Press). The book’s reception was undoubtedly aided by the triumph of democratic ideas so . . . . Continue Reading »
Before we dismantle this imposing structure, let’s step back a moment and admire its elegant lines.” Thus Alex Tourigny, my teacher of philosophical psychology forty years ago, was wont to mark the pause before the crusher. His version of the crusher was a deadly “reduction to first . . . . Continue Reading »
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