Western Civilization

When You’re Headed the Wrong Way, Turn Around 17
- Culture, History, Politics, Uncategorized, Western Civilization
- August 29, 2022
Eighty-five percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, an AP-NORC survey found in June. Large majorities disapproved of the current administration’s handling of the pandemic, gun policy, and the economy. If we look at the road we have traveled to arrive at this point, we find that the GPS for
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Reflections on the Reality We’re Facing 11
- Family, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization
- August 25, 2022
In his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell recounts an incident in which he and Johnson were discussing philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s idea that matter was non-existent, that everything in the world is ideal. When Boswell says that the bishop’s hypothesis cannot be refuted, Johnson kicks a large stone and says, “I refute him thus.” Philosophers
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The Counter-Repudiation That’s on the Way 8
- Culture, Politics, Western Civilization
- August 17, 2022
Philosopher, writer, and teacher Roger Scruton labeled our age “the culture of repudiation” in his 1998 book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture. Though I am oversimplifying here, his basic premise was that academics and other influential writers and thinkers had given up defending, much less advancing, Western thought and culture. Many, in fact,
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Riding the Underground with Winston Churchill 4
- Culture, History, Politics, Uncategorized, Western Civilization
- August 15, 2022
Five minutes and 47 seconds. That’s the length of the scene when Prime Minister Winston Churchill avails himself of the Underground, also called the Tube, in the film Darkest Hour (2017), a brief and fictitious cinematic interlude, yes, but one bulging with messages for us today. On boarding the carriage, as the English call it,
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A Man Without a Country? … Not Quite Yet 6
- Culture, Literature, Western Civilization
- August 11, 2022
In January 1978, Kris and I were married in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—admittedly not the most propitious time weather-wise for a wedding. We’d saved our money, enabling us to honeymoon in Europe, spending a month with a friend in Switzerland and then traveling as cheaply as possible to Italy and France. One example of the times and
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What Are We Going to Do When It Happens Again?6
- Culture, Politics, Science, Western Civilization
- August 5, 2022
Recently I ordered a copy of Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human, and began the book the day it arrived. Like you who are reading my words, I lived through the lockdowns, the masks, the school and church closures, and all the rest of it.
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