Culture | Articles
Interview with Jerry Leeman: Today we bring you a story about a handful of fishermen rallying against a billion-dollar green industrial project, shady foreign corporations, and our own federal and state government. All are conspiring to generate a cash cow for...
By Greg Yates The criminal case People v Gosselin took place in a little red house structure known as the “Town of Highland Justice Court” located in Sullivan County, New York. This little red structure is also known as the Barryville Town Hall, where court is...
* SPECIAL SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL ISSUE *The revolutionary and founding generations did their heroic part in bequeathing to us this legacy of freedom. So abundant is this gift that to live up to it is the most fulfilling thing we can do.
Charlie, you see, has suffered enough. He’s gone to the Lord. He deserves his reward.
Millions of Americans are asking for a reexamination of our culture and society with an eye to restoring ancient decency and looking to the good of past generations.
Trump has repeatedly said that his common-sense revolution would usher in a “new golden age.” In the context of unleashing the economy and technological innovation, we can understand this to mean literal gold. But a large part of our new golden age will be aggregated under the rubric of normality. The return of common sense is also the return of the normal. What would that look like in the realm of culture?
This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater harm—no quicker way to bring America to its knees—than by driving our children to do themselves irreversible damage.
America is a shining example of sports’ transformative power. The games we play, the games at the center of our social behavior, combine with our founding principles to enhance the American experience. America’s enemies know this, which is why the culture war has moved to our arenas and stadiums.
The best expression of this aspect of Thanksgiving comes from Benjamin Franklin, who called it a day “of public Felicity.”
When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life.
Monuments, because they are public art forms, must be legible. And this requires a great degree of convention.
What’s unique about Dawn Treader is that, structurally, you have this series of adventures as the ship sails from island to island
In 1853, a professor and preacher named Ransom Dunn set off to raise funds for Hillsdale College, an institution of higher learning in Michigan.
The lesson of her whole life is: If you don’t try, you won’t succeed; but if you do try, you cannot imagine how successful you might be.
In 1936, Roosevelt’s was also the popularity of a leader who had invented a new way to reward the constituencies that he needed to win.
Cultural restoration, Russell Kirk said, begins at home. And in today’s media saturated culture, I dare to say that it may also begin at the movie theater.
Femininity was the feminine mystique that had been imposed on women by men in order to subordinate women, even enslave them.
We must remember that our kids want us to be involved in their lives. They don’t really want or need another gadget or the hottest video game.
In today’s world of mass media and instant communication, movies still have an enormous effect on our culture and an even larger effect on younger Americans
This revolution in the legal system has begun to transform American politics. The part of this that gets the most press today is the litigation lobby
We are not given other tools than study and learning, prayer and devotion, argument and action, with which to defend our liberty.
To think about Islam, we find ourselves first of all engaged in the question of what Islam is.
There is a time to lay down arms, and there is a time to take them up, and that we are now in a time to take them up is self-evident.
Freedom is not maintained by military might. History is strewn with the wreckage of great civilizations that fell for lack of morality.
For some reason, American journalists in recent decades have assailed the Constitution with startling vigor.
Today at this hour President Bush is attending church services in Washington, D.C. He has asked the news media to announce this fact.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the most meaningful explication of modesty comes from the Bible.
May we now recapture our love for our constitutional system, the structure that has allowed this great Republic to grow and prosper.
The time has come to recover the courage of our forefathers, who understood that faith and freedom are inseparable and that they are worth fighting for.
Hostility toward truth is extremely convenient for reporters because it frees them from the deadening and demeaning task of transmitting facts.
In an age of instant communication, the media creates the impression that sleaze is everywhere.
According to recent news reports about the economy, America appears to be doing better than ever before. The stock market is up, the deficit is down—prosperity seems to be everywhere. Morally and culturally, however, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are on the verge of bankruptcy. The fact is that over the last quarter century we have squandered our spiritual capital. When I was a small child, I learned the bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the
Sports teach important moral lessons that athletes can apply on and off the playing field.
Anthropologists teach us that notions of the sacred are inherent in human nature. In other words, as human beings we have a natural propensity to consecrate, to sanctify, to make holy. The word “sacred” refers to that which is set apart as holy or which is dedicated to some exalted purpose. We secure sacred things against defamation or violation. Sacred things, then, we say are inviolate. Human life, for example, is inviolate. It is one of the things we hold most sacred. We have strict laws to protect it. Some cultures hold that all life is sacred. There is a
We believe that our form of government, as articulated in the Constitution, has brought forth the most successful society in the history of the world.
Much of what is described as “good character” or “virtue” reflects the ability to delay or inhibit impulse gratification.
Virtue is indeed the oxygen of a free society. As it fills our lungs, we become a people of strength, capable of vigorously exercising the kind of self-governance that our founding fathers expected of us. Without virtue, however, there can be no self-governance.
What will guarantee the success of our generation and generations to come? I believe that the answer to all these questions is the power of the individual.
This confusing of the state of freedom with the state of nihilism is one which colleges must address when students enter the college doors
It isn’t easy these days for students to be decent and responsible, or to even agree upon what those words mean in our troubled modern world.
Someone once observed, “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.” The Star of Bethlehem is certainly a story, as is most of the Bible.
Each decade offered us hope, but our hopes evaporated into smoke. We became the poorest of the poor, the most segregated minority in schools.
Dependency upon what government offers—whether empty rights or degrading welfare—has robbed us of the drive so necessary to sustain and strengthen the institutions of the village.
We desperately need to uncover the real root cause of criminal behavior and learn how criminals are formed if we are to fight this growing threat.
When we look at the present system, we are dealing with not just the dispersal of dollars but with the destruction of lives.
The welfare state is much more than a set of entitlements and subsidies—and its impact reaches much further than the disadvantaged underclass
Jesus Christ, the greatest man who ever lived, has changed virtually every aspect of human life—and most people don’t know it.
America is literally built upon the backs of the small businessperson and that is the way it has been throughout our more than 200 years.
If you slept through the sixties, you woke to a different America. It was the pivotal point of the recent past—an authentic decade of decision.
Today, however, the typical college has become a crucible, a place for extracting the passions of politics, race, gender, and other contentious issues.
The word economics, I observed, comes from the Greek “oikos nomos,” which literally means “the law or custom of the home.”
You believe that government is a limited instrument. Washington, D.C. believes that government can create a utopia on earth.
The great paradox of the 1990s is that while liberalism is on its death bed in this country, it still controls almost all our major institutions.
We forget that good intentions are not enough, and that massive government programs carry unintended consequences.
I said at the outset that this stage in Russia’s transition to democracy is cause for optimism and pessimism. Ultimately, I think optimism will triumph.
Genuine citizenship involves active participation in that vast realm of human affairs known as civil society.
Can we really sustain the city of man without the influence of the City of God? St. Augustine argued that it was impossible.
What began as the attempt to politicize psychology (and psychologize politics) had led to the swallowing of each by the other and the emergence of a new form of therapeutic politics.
Since 1976, Milwaukee has been under court order to “racially balance” its public schools. Now, there are about one hundred thousand school-age children in this city. Approximately 70 percent are black or belong to other minorities.
Television, in fact, has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system or government or church. Children are particularly susceptible.
More than half a century ago, America was in the middle of a wrenching depression. One-third of our nation’s wealth vanished in a matter of months.
The New York Times Magazine recently alerted us to a “return to religion” among intellectuals. It struck me as odd and perhaps even alarming
Gramsci believed that the way for Marxists to come to power was by taking over the cultural institutions of nations: schools, universities, churches, popular entertainment.
On the one hand, the constant refrain of public television is poverty; and, on the other hand, the reality is self-indulgence.
In words that would inspire for centuries, Socrates refused to stoop to a genuine defense of his actions and what he saw as begging for forgiveness
The diction of our news, the images of our television advertising, the cut of our clothing—all these things provide indices to the collective characters.
We live in an entrepreneurial era. New businesses are sprouting everywhere, and small business owners possess a renewed measure of social status.
Much of the fruits of modern life may be attributed to the generosity and drive of millions of volunteers, philanthropists, and non-profit representatives.
Douglas Edwards, the senior anchorman at CBS, has called censorship one of the greatest threats to democracy.
The mid-1980s brought a crisis in availability and affordability of liability insurance that was unprecedented in its impact on our society.
Each generation makes it choices and evaluations about what it wants to save and what it wants to relegate to the dump.
If public and critical interest in the novel has declined, it has done so in large part because the novel has dramatically lost authority.
They have grown up in a society addicted to an hypnotic instrument of passivity; they have the leisure to be drawn into postures that involve no pain.
Washington is a very different world. In my opinion, there’s no tougher place to exhibit leadership. Its inhabitants have confused priorities.
When we were younger we made up stories in our heads—daydreams. Needless to say, the heroes and heroines of these stories were always ourselves.
Long after our boys in Europe were demobilized, Hollywood was still fighting fascism. This catch-all category includes anything opposed to the Left.
No communist regime anywhere in the world is based on the freely given consent of the peoples imprisoned within its borders.
We recognize at once our continuing habits of meretriciousness, sentimentality, and ephemeral or ill-considered “relevance”; our striving for immediate emotional effect over tempered understanding of matter and manner.
In recent years there has been a coming together of Catholics and Evangelicals motivated by a growing recognition of the threats to Christianity itself posed both by the secular culture and by liberal Christianity.
If you’re a businessman you don’t have time for poetry, unless, of course, you happen to enjoy it the way other businessmen enjoy Monday Night Football.
We are here tonight to celebrate the American experience, its glorious legitimacy and success. The drama, excitement, and revolutionary quality of that experience are only barely sensed even by those of us who are carriers of it today.
We, the American people, are carrying a heavy responsibility. If liberty is to survive, if the forces of totalitarianism are to be thwarted in their attempts to expand their grips on mankind, much will depend on us.
The most sudden and sweeping upheaval in beliefs and values has taken place in this century. No generation in the history of human thought has seen such swift and radical inversion of ideas and ideals as in our lifetime.
What I want to talk about today is something that my confreres in the world of literature and journalism resist: the notion that ideas can become articles of fashion which are adopted with no more foundation than styles in clothing.
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove.
We can anticipate that recombinant DNA technology will present problems that are as pervasive and disquieting as those that have sprung from nuclear fission.
Science raises many important issues for society—yet none are more important than those being created by genetic engineering.
Without doubt Americans regard themselves as a free people. But how well does their society fit the prescription of freedom?
We can confound the prophets of doom by opening the vast and rich High Frontier of space for industrialization.
This, then, would be wisdom’s final fruit: to be true to self, yet never to become a slave of self.
It is within the territory of refined emotions where the final battle of a regenerated, healthy, and moral society will take place.
For all the recorded history of human beings on this earth, various degrees of tyranny have been the natural state of affairs for most people.
But, on the Christian view, if it is not sanctity toward which we must move, on pain of our lives, then what is it?
Abraham Lincoln once said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison: “The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
In simpler days a reporter went out and covered a political speech and came back and wrote his story. The paper printed it, and the reader received it.
The special vice of the media is that they create a “false consciousness.” We may know what they say about things we are familiar with is unreliable, but we think they must be reliable about other things.
I accepted the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in December 18, 1819: “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry?”
In the course of life, whether it has to do with family or business, joy or sadness, one needs a basic compass for judgments.
A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.
To understand the role of the press in revolution, however, we must accept the press as both important in the fight for freedom and a tool of oppression throughout its history. It has not been simply one or the other: it has been both.
We go on trying to understand politics in terms of politics alone, as though political beliefs and problems existed in a vacuum.
No myth of the 20th century is more pervasive than the belief that intellectuals determine the climate of opinion and shape the values of their society.
All of our great presidents tangled with the press, and their supporters made reference to its power and ability to set the agenda of the national debate.
I am going to argue that ideas often stand in an illuminating relationship to some objective reality, but that often, perhaps most of the time, that is not their primary function.
Have these United States—or rather, the people of this country—lost the sense of what makes life worth living?
Without the New Left there would have been no outraged cry from Middle Americans for the restoration of order.
Science is increasingly coming under attack. Not only from outsiders who do not understand science but now also from disrupters within.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a context for understanding why the issue of sexual equality will be so difficult to resolve.
Those of us in the advantaged top 10 percent in business are the ones with the opportunity, the obligation, and the safe means to do the corrective job.
Before the fall of Spiro Agnew it was fast becoming the new conventional wisdom to believe our communications media had become philosophically corrupt.
There are many other men who, in our time of troubles and mass uniformity of opinion have maintained their moral and intellectual integrity.
We know of no human community whose members do not have a vision of perfection in which the frustrations inherent in our human condition are transcended.
