There is no secret plot or conspiracy to undermine our national sovereignty, unless by conspiracy we mean the collective will of the political class. The Bushes and the Clintons would be rightly outraged if they heard rumors of such suspicions. Opposing globalization today is like criticizing affirmative action, challenging women’s rights, or pointing out that homosexuals are a serious drain on our finite medical resources.
Whether it is merely a temporary aberration, a ray of hope, or purely a method of getting new music (that might actually be performed) published, a number of composers over the last decades have returned to some semblance of tonality and melody. Few things divert my mind and heart from the ugliness of current politics and popular culture better than the beauty of creation during high summer or excellent music. These two poems, on summery themes, and the musical settings of them I have selected may momentarily lift you from the drudgery. Gwyneth Walker is a Vermont composer who resides...
In his novel Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy. Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition. This is a late reflection of the tradition of Romantic heroism that usually ends disastrously in fiction. Remember Julien Sorel? Raskolnikov? What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel. Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the...
Until the end of his life Maurice Barrès was the great exponent of French nationalism, indeed he was the founder of the modern French nationalism that is conservative and patriotic, instead of as a Jacobin or a Marxist. What happened?
A girl at the age of twelve (or younger) may be physically mature enough to conceive a child, but is she intellectually or morally mature enough to think through an issue. She is not allowed to drive or vote or sue in court or be convicted of murder as an adult. Why? Because, as nearly everyone with any intellectual maturity understands, children—male and female—are not well formed enough to be held entirely accountable for their actions.
From the Christian and ethical perspective, however, freedom is essentially a moral and spiritual condition . Political and economic freedom, if it means simply that a man as the right to choose Burger King over MacDonald’s, Taylor Swift over Lady Gaga, or even a female over a male wife, amounts to very little
As calls for Trump’s impeachment or criminal prosecution get louder and louder, some Republicans are defending Trump by distinguishing his case from that of the evil Nixon. Those who are old enough to remember Watergate understand it was a tempest in a teapot. As one liberal commentator at the time pointed out, Nixon made the mistake of challenging the power of the permanent federal bureaucracy and they lynched him. It was the low point of Sam Ervin’s career, but he had justifiable concerns about the administration’s abuse of power that had nothing to do with the break-in. The rest were...
The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting in Birmingham this week, and Josh Doggrell (real name of FB friend and reader) was able to get a copy of their itinerary for Day One:
The “evil” referred to in the Lord’s Prayer is almost certainly personal,” Evil One who hates us and is forever putting us to the test. This is only the first installment of a discussion of evil.
I had insomnia the other night, and it so happened that my son, who leads what I suspect is a dissolutely sleepless life in London, engaged me in correspondence about a Russian poem we both knew. He wrote that he had tried to translate it into English, but “it kept coming out as a string of banalities.” So I spent the remaining small hours of the night trying to prove my son wrong, to succeed where, in my view, Vladimir Nabokov failed in his translation: Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream, the things you feel. Deep...
