Dr. Frank Brownlow, “The Song of Roland” Fleming Foundation Summer Symposium 1000 Years of Jihad Conference Date: July 13, 2016 Location: Rockford, IL Run Time: 1 hour Guest: Dr. Frank Brownlow Original Air Date: November 23, 2016
In Search of a Vocation I have never felt entirely comfortable in my own time. Most men who have passed the age of seventy, as I have, have lived long enough to seem, and not just to others, fossils from another geological age. I have felt that way not only recently but already as a boy, and when I read Booth Tarkington, his world appeared quite normal. It was MGM musicals, Frank Sinatra, and the YMCA that struck me as bizarre. Even later, when I was trying my best to ape the avant-garde—reading without pleasure the artless productions of the...
Nobody is talking about Trump in London, I’m happy to say. From a geopolitical perspective – provided you believe, as I do, that geopolitics is stark reality by a fancy name – this is naïve and foolish and a bit like hiding your head in the sand. From a human perspective, however, it is immensely satisfying. I would happily fly back to England just to escape the interminable tête-à-tête with the newsfeeds on my computer screen, where Trump has now overtaken the Kardashians as statesman and thinker. I stayed with my best friend there, the one who is getting divorced. ...
In “A Secret Glory,” the Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen describes the foibles of his hero Meyrick, who is forever condemning institutions that fail to live up to the high standards he has set for them. At first, as a student, I must confess, I shared young Meyrick’s contempt for mere pedantry, though I knew pedants like Douglas Young, Brooks Otis, TRS Broughton, and Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones among others, who (like B.L. Gildersleeve) were scholars in both senses. I learned too late, however, that even the mere pedants stand head and shoulders above the toad-licking poseurs–Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists–who now infest the humanities....
This is long overdue: “President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are drawing up plans to take on the government bureaucracy they have long railed against, by eroding job protections and grinding down benefits that federal workers have received for a generation.” No wonder Virginia voted for Hillary. After the South switched to Republicans around the 1970s, the Old Dominion regularly voted for the GOP. When I lived there during the mid-1980s, the Maryland suburbs of D.C. were the place Democrats liked to live, while Northern Virginia was where Republicans tended to move, probably because that’s where the Pentagon and...
“Limited government” is a phrase one hears a good deal, especially from Republican candidates for office, who claim to be in favor of it. Since election to office has now become a guaranteed way to become rich quickly, we can assume that those candidates do not really mean what they say. Besides, no government will voluntarily limit itself. The only way to limit a government is to use force. Twice in Anglo-American history people have successfully used force to limit government. In both cases the result was a government limited by constitutional law, and in both cases the result proved...
Desperate to get his name into the news, Garrison Keillor is now posing as a political pundit. We now live in two nations, civilized Christian people who voted for Hillary and the yahoos who voted for Trump “Broadway shows will now feel obliged to give lectures on diversity to any prominent Trumpist in the audience. Trumpists will explain, as one woman did, “Voting for him was the only way I could say that I exist.” (People who shoot up theaters may feel the same way.) The Trump faction will boycott chamber music concerts, wine tastings, lectures on Byzantine art and poetry...
This Perspective from January 1986 analyzed the budding sanctuary movement and dissected its entirely bogus spiritual, moral and constitutional foundations. It infuriated Richard John Neuhaus, who at that time led the movement to silence an irritating political heretic. I was naive and did not yet realize how much so-called conservatives hate the truth, whenever it conflicts with the short-term goals of their little movement. “Shelter from the Storm” The trial of 12 sanctuary workers in Tucson has heated up an issue which is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980’s. The movement, whose members...
Mike Pence went to the hottest show on Broadway-a leftist/revolutionary travesty of Alexander Hamilton and, he found himself insulted and attacked by the cast. He must have been shocked to discover that leftists are never honorable. Don’t like the Catholic Church? Then rape and murder nuns and blow up churches. Don’t like the Czar? Murder his family. Don’t like the way people in Florida and Alabama voted in a presidential election? Tear up Portland and Los Angeles, where they voted your way. The left has never played by any rules but its own, and those are the simple rules...
This is Trollope’s musings on the sermon preached by the odious Mr. Slope in Barchester Cathedral: There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. Let a...
