The Godless Constitution and the Providential Nation by Steven D. Smith is timely reading for America’s 250th birthday, especially amid increasing debates over Christian Nationalism. 　　Even as American religious practice has declined over several decades, more religious voices are paradoxically clamoring to legally establish their preferred form of religion. Integralists want a Catholic confessional state. Some Calvinists who self-identify as...

　　The Polish Jew, writer, and artist Bruno Schulz wrote that the purpose of art is “to plumb the depths of what has no name.” That certainly describes the fiction of Franz Kafka, whom Schulz translated. Kafka attempted to fathom psychosocial forces that are visible only in their effects: agglomerations and collisions of charged human particles caught in their massive gravitational...

　　Dolly Parton died August 25, the most famous woman in country music and one of the few very famous artists left us. After about 60 years of marriage (her husband Carl Dean died last year) and as long a career, Dolly is mourned across the nation, across the generations, across most cultural divides, and even political ones. She was born...

　　This is the final essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Click the links to read about Robert Nisbet, Wilhelm Roepke, and Frank Meyer. 　　Willmoore Kendall, the precocious “boy wonder” of rural Oklahoma, was the son of a blind Methodist minister, a...

　　The Gilded Age was convicted by its name before its history was ever written. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined that appellation in their political satire by the same name. Their point was clear—the American era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the opposite of a golden age. Instead, it was a time when a thin...

　　Cooking has never been my comparative advantage. In grad school, my motto was, “As long as I have a tortilla, anything can be a burrito.” This led to much trial and error in my apartment kitchen with (mostly) edible results. When I splurged on takeout, burritos gave me a large quantity of good food at a decent price. 　　More than...

　　This is the third essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. The next entry, on Willmoore Kendall, will be published tomorrow, August 27. You can read about Robert Nisbet here and Wilhelm Roepke here. 　　Mike Wallace told Frank Meyer on television in...

　　David Hume thought philosophically about politics. If he had not, John Witherspoon, the Princeton educator who taught a future president, a future vice president, as well as future judges, senators, and representatives, would not have recommended his writings to his students. Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher, would not have developed an entire system of thought—taught in Scotland and the United...

　　This is the second essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. The next entry, on Frank Meyer, will be published tomorrow, August 26. You can read about Robert Nisbet here. 　　In his A Program for Conservatives, Russell Kirk once recounted the story...

　　The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations has brought a burst of renewed attention to the Scottish Enlightenment. Discussions have ranged widely, from Adam Smith’s conception of aesthetics to how the thought of his teacher, the “never-to-be-forgotten” Francis Hutcheson, shaped the American Revolution. 　　But amidst these discussions, one important question has received little consideration. Why did such a remarkable...

　　There’s too little sex and violence in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. And it matters. There’s too little religion and supernaturalism, too. That the anodyne Epicureanism of Nolan’s Odyssey is widely construed as Nolan “Christianizing” Homer’s story is testimony to the insipidity of much of what passes today for Christianity. 　　We’ll start with sex and violence, and then get to religion. 　　First,...

　　The year 1776 is notable for new beginnings. But it also saw the death of one of the greatest philosophers in the Western tradition. David Hume (1711–76) is often described by ideological labels such as liberal or conservative, as well as eighteenth-century party names (Whig and Tory). But these labels obfuscate Hume’s intentions. Neither an ideologue nor a party man,...