Like many other Catholics living in the United States, I was alternatively bemused by and dismayed at a particular tweet issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on January 10, 2022. For a moment, I thought we were reliving the 1970s. In the context of encouraging ordinary Catholics to involve themselves in the synodal process launched by Pope Francis to engage in reflection on the challenges facing the Catholic Church today, someone with access to the...

Heidi and Moshe—two young Princeton University scholars, one secular and cosmopolitan, the other religious and Zionist—are bickering. What’s the big surprise?They hold diametrically opposing worldviews. They argue whether Jews should adopt or reject their national identity. “How can you justify your narrow tribal loyalty?” asks Heidi, a student in the faculty of humanities. “Isn’t the lesson of the Holocaust that we Jews must never put our parochial interests ahead of others’ interests? We should know better than anyone what...

Fracture and fragmentation border on cliché in the struggling pluralist democracies of the world, the United States fore among them. We are beset with our differences, amplified and exaggerated as they may be by the echo chambers of our own design, many a product of the technologies of connection that once seemed to hold so much promise to e our tribal polarizations. Pessimism is the rule as we slide into the twin dystopias of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous extremes,...

In Whatever Happened to Tradition? British journalist Tim Stanley seeks to answer his titular question while simultaneously making an apology for the allegedly elusive “tradition” to which something has “happened.” Spoiler alert: It’s liberalism. Stanley adds his own Christian Blue Labour brand of indictment against this much-maligned social and political philosophical tradition to the large chorus of voices that say, more or less, exactly the same thing. From Yoram Hazony to Patrick Deneen to Alistair McIntyre to Brad Gregory...

It is clear to even the most casual observer of the religious world in America that churches today face significant challenges to their public reputation, challenges that have undermined everything from their capacity to speak with authority in the public square to their ability mand loyalty from their own members. Is there any hope that this situation may be reversed, or are the churches in the West now doomed to slow but inexorable decline? As Matthew Arnold likened the...

She knew what the most important things were in life and kept them in proper order from start to finish: God, family, freedom, munity. She possessed the highest personal character because she understood that character was an indispensable foundation for everything else. She was a model American. Such a woman was Ethelmae Humphreys of Joplin, Missouri, who passed away on December 27, 2021, two weeks shy of her 95th birthday. The many freedom-loving organizations she supported over the years,...

It is not an intrinsic indictment of today’s national government to say that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution would not recognize it. They were, after all, revolutionaries who threw off the mother empire on the battlefield and threw off the Articles of Confederation behind closed doors. They neither asked nor sought either unthinking or eternal submission. The question is whether their wisdom and the endurance of their handiwork merit deferential respect. Lincoln thought they did. He explained at...

In Race and Justice in America, Kevin Schmiesing collects several essays dealing with American race relations from a perspective that affirms the American ideal, grounds it in Christian natural law, and celebrates markets and entrepreneurship. Robert Woodson, a former civil rights activist and conservative who champions black progress through ownership and entrepreneurship, wrote the foreword. It sets the tone for a collection that seems to have been put together to show that conservatives and free marketers can acknowledge America’s...

In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony aims to summon American conservatives from the somnambulant, rationalistic, and individualistic fate to which their ideas have inexorably led them. He argues that this depleted condition results from a fault in their reasoning about nature, namely, the notion that one can locate universal truth and articulate it as the sound basis of a nation’s political foundation and principles. Man’s reason is weak, he notes, and prone to disagreement, with a propensity to associate...