Forty years ago, the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy published what is easily the strangest book of his writing career. Lost in the Cosmos distills the major themes of both his novels and his philosophical essays into a little over 250 pages of multiple-choice questions (and peculiar answers), hypotheticals, and brief stories. Continue Reading...
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November 08, 2023
Recovering the Melting Pot
Up until a few decades ago, it was common to think of the United States as a melting pot. People from all over the world would come to this great country, adopt American values, and learn English while also bringing a piece of their former culture to mix into the broader American culture. Continue Reading...
November 07, 2023
Golda: The Right Leader at the Right Time
On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,500 people and taking hostages, committing, filming, and publicizing on social media acts of terror that the citizens of democracies are simply unprepared to watch or understand. Continue Reading...
November 03, 2023
Discriminating Harvard
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), which invalidated the use of race as a criterion for college admissions, dominated several summer news cycles and prompted no shortage of opinion pieces and responses. Continue Reading...
November 02, 2023
Can We Unlearn Race?
This three-part series on race and the right began with a look at some truly telling statistics about how badly American conservatives are doing at taking on racial issues. Politically, 85% of Republican voters are white—the most racially homogeneous the party’s been since 2016 and the rise of Donald Trump. Continue Reading...
November 01, 2023
Overlooking Rural America
With magnifying glass in hand, a budding naturalist can learn a great deal about ants scuttling around the driveway. Were the ants to glance upward, however, they might learn even more about the eager eyes—blown up from the ant’s perspective to enormous proportions—looking down at them. Continue Reading...
October 31, 2023
Setting the World Ablaze, Thales-Style
Business and educational entrepreneur Robert L. Luddy is a conservative Catholic who embraces dynamism and adaptability in bringing visions to life. Thales Academy is one such vision. In his new book, The Thales Way, Luddy provides the blueprint for and origin story of this now immensely successful classical school franchise. Continue Reading...
October 27, 2023
Halcyon: A Resurrection Without Salvation
Set in the opening decade of the current millennium, Elliot Ackerman’s Halcyon is a tale based on many alternative historical events—most notably, that Al Gore won the 2000 election, oversaw the capture of Osama bin Laden shortly after the 9/11 attacks, declined to launch into the Iraq conflict, and, most relevantly, funded advanced medical research that made possible the book’s central premise: the ability to revivify the dead. Continue Reading...
October 26, 2023
Scorsese’s Moral Vision Shines Through Killers of the Flower Moon
What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the modern age with his masterpieces Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed. Continue Reading...
October 25, 2023
How States Strike Back at Federal Religious-Freedom Protections
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in which the majority of the court ruled that the Constitution supports a right to marry for same-sex couples, many Americans in the “wedding business” faced a dilemma. Continue Reading...