“When men follow justice, the whole city blooms, the earth bears rich harvests, and children and flocks increase, but to the unjust all nature is hostile, the people waste away from famine and pestilence, and a single man’s sin may bring ruin on a whole city.” — Hesiod From Rome to Washington, the Successors to … Read more
Only the gifted pen of a Tom Wolfe could have minted the generation-defining sobriquet, radical chic. It first appeared in a long monograph in New York magazine in 1970, where the author wrote a withering piece describing a fashionable cocktail party at the West Side apartment of Leonard Bernstein. The impresario had invited the glitterati … Read more
“The counter-revolution will not be a contrary revolution, but the contrary of revolution.” — Joseph de Maistre Should Catholics be excommunicated for holding views on race which are found to be insufficiently woke? The Jesuits seem to think so. In a June 1 editorial, America magazine urged Catholics to “hunger for [social] justice like we … Read more
Six or seven centuries “are like an evening gone” when tracing the course of common sense, and so James Madison found no anachronism in conjuring the shades of Juvenal and Cleon, more than six centuries apart, to make a point about the perils of the right and wrong manipulation of human will. He asked with … Read more
There is no question that the death of George Floyd is highly questionable. The shocking and shameful insurgencies erupting in cities across the country propose that the answer is rooted in an engrained American racism. That response, too, is highly questionable. In a sense, the reaction is as disturbing as the incident itself. As fire … Read more
Hollywood award shows used to be de rigeur viewing for most Americans. No more. Perhaps because a kind of collective delirium has set upon the artist class. Take the Emmy’s this past Sunday, for instance. One of the celebrity winners, Donald Glover—a black man—snidely remarked, “I want to thank Trump for making black people number … Read more
The events in Charlottesville have shaken the nation, and many have rightly condemned the violence at the August 12 protest that resulted in one tragic death and many wounded. Some were hesitant to make a sweeping condemnation pointing to the violence of the counter-protesters as a factor that must also be considered. Others feared that … Read more
Police shootings have been lighting up the media for the last couple of years, with incidents such as Philando Castile’s death in Falcon Heights, MN and Alton Sterling’s in Baton Rouge, LA continuing to raise questions and inspire protests this summer. Hardly had the nation composed itself before blood ran again, this time in Tulsa, … Read more
In a speech delivered to the Annual MAS-ICNA (Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America) Convention in December 2015, Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), urged Muslim Americans to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter. “Black Lives Matter is our matter,” he said; “Black Lives … Read more