Category: Society
The Perpetual Motion Machine and the Pandemic
My grandmother is eighty-five years old. She will die someday. I want her to die well and, in the meantime, to live well. She lives with my aunt about ten minutes from where I live with my wife and four...
Public Reasoning in a Pandemic: Responding to Moore, Reno, and Littlejohn
The rapidly expanding number of Covid-19 cases in the United States poses an extraordinary test of our nation’s institutions and their leaders. In recent days, a discussion has broken out about how we should integrate our interest in preserving and...
“No Wealth But Life”: Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic
Two weeks ago we awoke from our dogmatic slumber of American exceptionalism to realize that the coronavirus was not merely some “Chinese virus,” or the bane of aging Italians. America, and her public officials in particular, have been playing catch...
The Tribe of Ishmael: Whiteness and Christian Identity
In 1889, an Indianapolis pastor named Oscar McCulloch gave a speech that empowered the development of eugenics in America. McCulloch had studied the Ishmaelites, a poor, white, extended family, and named his speech, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in...
Learning in Quarantine
For my students On 9/11, I was a senior in college. It was my birthday, in fact. After sleeping in (as I said, it was my birthday), I came downstairs in my off-campus apartment. I couldn’t find anyone. It was...
The Freedom of the Trad
Freddie De Boer has a typically sharp post up at his personal blog analyzing the ‘trad’ trend in some (mostly culturally elite) social circles. Do read the whole thing, but this graf gets at the main critique nicely: Here’s the...
The Unexpected Virtue of Arbitrary Sports Allegiances
I live in a baseball town. I know this because in the fall of 2011, I found myself in a divey pizza joint with a bunch of other transplants from other parts of the country watching one of the most...
Ecumenism of the Grave
“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” — 1 Corinthians 15:19 Walt Whitman was one of the first in America to articulate the modern sensibility with respect to death. He...
The Lost City: What’s the use of cities in a world of states?
I once quoted to my father, who is of a Marxist disposition and considers patriotism “the last refuge of scoundrels”, the famous words of Sir Walter Scott: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath...
An Intercourse with Ghosts: The Unabomber, Irony, and Terror
1. To write about Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, is to sit for a moment with the ghosts of his victims peering over your shoulder. The dead and the maimed, both. Just as much as you try to...