James Matthew Wilson
In 1930, “Twelve Southerners” published a thick volume of essays entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Led by the already venerable poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, the contributors responded, at once, to the increasing industrialization of the southern states over the previous few decades, the sudden trials of the … Read more
In a recent essay in Partisan Magazine, Daniel Brown argues that the decline of the humane disciplines has come about through an envy of the physical sciences and, in particular, the impossible desire to replicate the kind of revolutionary insights that have given those sciences their prestige in the modern age. Brown accounts for this … Read more
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on gay “marriage,” the culture of atomic eros, claims to reign triumphant and looks forward to forming our culture in the decades ahead. But, all persons of good will have a moral obligation to resist its march, and so I want to remind us of four … Read more
Do you remember the joke about the Irish brewery worker who drowned in a vat of suds? “Poor Sean,” the new widow said upon learning her husband’s fate, “He didn’t stand a chance.” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Reilly,” replies the foreman. “He did crawl out three times to use the bathroom.” The Republic of Ireland … Read more
Have a look at this article, whose nominal subject is academic freedom and whose implicit subject is the crudity and ineptitude with which a professor at a third tier state university can go about instructing his students: [Liberty Counsel’s] complaint relates to Grace Lewis, a high school student enrolled at Polk State through the Florida … Read more
At this hour, we all bear witness to the spectacle of laws accurately defining marriage being dismantled in order to establish a rhetorical equivalence between genuine marital unions and those rare associations formed out of same-sex desires. One substantial club in this act of moral viciousness is an appeal to sentiment that tries to persuade … Read more
At the top, at least, the Obama campaign was premised on a clear vision of citizenship. As a matter of course, the President spoke words of good will toward his fellow Americans, promising that those who heard him were joining him in a great enterprise. He gestured toward our responsibility to our neighbors and our … Read more
In Kenneth D. Whitehead’s short essay in this magazine, the recent liberal Catholic manifesto, All on Our Shoulders, is helpfully but incompletely criticized. At the core of his argument rests the claim that the document constructs a straw man out of Paul Ryan’s 2005 address to the Atlas Society, in which Ryan praised the free … Read more
Late in life, Pope John Paul II gave a series of interviews subsequently collected in the book Memory and Identity (2005). There, in response to a question about the pervasive ideologies that had swept Europe during the past couple of centuries, and which had resulted in the slaughter of millions, he contended that in order … Read more