Recently in an airport, I saw and bought a rather provocative issue of Scientific American. The cover declared that humans ‘evolved’ to exercise, while the most similar forms of life – chimpanzees and bonobos – function very well as couch potatoes, according to […]
For a long time, we have spoken of elections, in which a President is not on the ballot, as ‘off-year elections’. I think the Founders would have been horrified by such a notion. The Congress, they would have thought, should […]
In C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, in the essay “Miracles” we read this: The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First, we must believe in a normal stability of Nature, which means we must recognize […]
Is there an appropriate place for icons in the 21st Century Protestant Church? There’s nothing new about the debate regarding sacred images and iconography, but I’ve gained some recent insights on the subject. In chapter 13 of Diarmaid McCullough’s work, Christianity: […]
In our time, politics and culture are increasingly oriented to the national scale on the one hand, and the immediate neighborhood on the other. A book, The Increasingly United States, by Daniel J. Hopkins, highlights this. However, in my view, besides […]
The United States has always been somewhat ambiguous about whether its primary loyalty was to the European Western World or to the Western Hemisphere (i.e., the Americas). The Founders thought of themselves as upholding the rights of Englishmen, which they […]
I always thought of Dick Dale as a local phenomenon, but his recent death got national coverage. The most thorough and best article was one in The New Yorker, a magazine which might well have turned up its nose during […]
These days many people are trying to defend ‘Western Civilization’. Yet, at the moment, Western Civilization seems to be moving into Version 3.0, and the form it will take is not fully clear. So what, actually, are they trying to […]
In the Appendixes to The Lord of the Rings, we learn that the Rohanians came from the north at a critical point to assist Gondor in one of its wars. Out of gratitude, Gondor gave them a stretch of its territory […]
I have written about the increasing use of civil law to bypass the limitations and ‘rights’ attached to criminal law. But yet another tactic has recently been discovered, and maybe not all that recently. The law and concept of rape has […]