Category: Featured
Death in Venice
In the summer of 1575, plague struck Venice. The city fathers tried to stem the contamination by requiring crews suspected of infection to stay on the island of Lazzaretto for forty days. These quaranta giorni are the origin of the...
Executive Orders Don’t Make Buildings Beautiful
A draft executive order has recently riled up the architectural community. Entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” it points out the ugliness in a number of modern architectural movements and calls for a return to classical and other traditional styles...
Dwyane Wade’s Selective Essentialism
Dwyane Wade’s enthusiasm for his child’s gender transition offers a fascinating example of transgender ideology’s selective performativity. Wade’s 12-year-old son, born Zion, recently announced he wanted to be referred to as a “she.” During an appearance on Ellen, Wade discussed...
The Key Question for the Sanders Campaign
Last night Bernie Sanders, unsurprisingly, won the New Hampshire primary. FiveThirtyEight now gives him a 38% of winning the Democratic nomination—his leading rival, at this point, is a brokered convention, which the site gives a 33% chance of happening. Prior...
Why Churches Need Artists
My church is accustomed to download a work of art corresponding to the sermon or the liturgical season and to print it on the bulletin. (This is something I love.) But, recently, we “discovered” a painter who had lived for...
A Hidden Life According to Neil Postman
What is it that makes Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life so starkly unique and beautifully profound? To answer this question, let’s start by considering literature. Great literature attempts to encapsulate the beauty and hardship of life and its relation to...
Star of the Sea
I have a weakness for verses about Mary and the sea. There is that line from Eliot, that bit of the Dry Salvages, when he asks the lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory to pray for all those who...
Happiness, Virtue, and the Bastard Science
Happiness is a personal problem. Or so it may seem. Consider the self-help section. A library of recent books offers just the right mindset, self-care regimen, or practical hack for troubled souls who, presumably, hope that one more piece of...
Why Protecting Rivers is a Conservative Cause
Rivers play a pivotal role in our national imagination. In school, we learn about Abraham Lincoln’s travels on the Mississippi River, or Lewis and Clark’s passage along river routes toward the Pacific Ocean. From the Bible, we learn of the...
Hinterland: Review of an Apocalypse
Shattered souls and ruined lives are the plot, and the ever-burgeoning, post-industrial wastelands created by the forces of global capitalism are the setting in Phil A. Neel’s gripping and brutal new book Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict....