In August 2008, as the world’s leaders gathered in Beijing for the Olympic games, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, hot-headed and erratic, made his gamble for greatness. It began with a stunning artillery barrage on Tskhinvali, capital of tiny South Ossetia, a province that had broken free of Tbilisi when Tbilisi broke free of Russia. … Read more
Fr. George Rutler of Crisis has a pithy way of saying it: “The three greatest blessings to mankind are Christianity, Penicillin, and the British Empire.” For teenage boys, who should already be well drilled in the tenets of Christianity, and might already have imbibed penicillin to deal with the odd ear infection or two, … Read more
The Avro York LV 633 “Ascalon” was an air transport developed in 1942, somewhat bulky in appearance with wings mounted high in the fuselage. It was Churchill’s favorite flight model, with enough space for a conference room. The name “Ascalon” was the traditional name for the lance used by St. George to slay the dragon, … Read more
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire. H.W. Crocker III. Regnery Publishing. $19.95. 327 pp. An American Catholic looks at the British Empire with some skepticism. The Empire brought with it unquestioned benefits, but its roots in the seventeenth-century are entwined with a deep hatred of Rome and the Catholic heritage of the … Read more
I’m always wary of using an Albert Einstein quotation because it seems somehow sort of well, sophomoric. There’s always that poster of the German genius with the googly eyes and goofy hair sticking out his tongue. Nevertheless, Einstein came up with some good ones about God not playing dice, and science being lame without religion … Read more
Someday, when today’s adults are old and gray, their grandchildren will sit down and ask, “What did you do in the class war?” You may not have noticed, but it seems we are in the midst of one. On this point, Republican candidates and officeholders are in agreement. Newt Gingrich accuses President Barack Obama … Read more
Has Barack Obama’s Democratic Party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with The Huffington Post, thinks so. Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in The New York Times on Nov. 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a … Read more
Time magazine didn’t mind ruffling feathers in religious America with a cover this summer that asked “Is Hell Dead?” Never mind that America is overwhelmingly Christian. Then Time found only one letter worth plucking out to feature in large, bold type from a man in Dallas: “Hell is easy to define. It would be … Read more
About a month ago this tragic story from China surfaced in the Western media (the UK’s Guardian). It’s a terribly sad story about a mother, Ma Jihong, who died on an operating table in Lijin, Shandong province, when she was forced by state officials to have a late-term abortion. Why were they forcing her to … Read more
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We … Read more
“Socrates understood … that a reform cannot be achieved by a well-intentioned leader who recruits his followers from the very people whose moral confusion is the cause of the disorder.” — Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle Lately I’ve been wondering if there are any conservatives left in the GOP. The Republican label hangs loosely … Read more
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column titled “Free to Die” (9/15/2011), pointed out that back in 1980, his late fellow Nobel laureate Milton Friedman lent his voice to the nation’s shift to the political right in his famous 10-part TV series, Free To Choose. Nowadays, Krugman says, “‘free to … Read more
As active U.S. military involvement in Iraq draws to a close, what does the moral scorecard on this adventure look like from an American point of view? Granted that a comprehensive weighing of results will only be possible some years from now, at the moment the picture is something like this. In a perverse way, … Read more
In the Middle Ages where Western universities were invented, theology was unchallenged as the “queen of the sciences.” Philosophy, the loving pursuit of wisdom, served as theology’s humble “handmaiden,” and arguments drawn from either could uncrown kings and change the fate of nations. Today, even in Catholic colleges, theology is treated more like the madwoman … Read more
Moving quietly under the cover of the presidential debates and the enormous publicity given to the Republican nomination race is a plan to change how U.S. presidents are elected. It would bypass the procedure spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, which has been used successfully for over two centuries. The Constitution prescribes how we … Read more
In his famous introductory chapter to A Guide for the Perplexed, the economist E. F. Schumacher talked of his “perplexity” at going to Oxford, perhaps the most famous university in the world. The title of Schumacher’s book was the same as that of a book of the medieval Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides. The perplexity of … Read more
American colleges and universities, widely admired throughout the world, have come under heavy fire in recent years. Critics complain that costs are too high, that too many professors shirk their classroom duties, that leftist indoctrination and political correctness are rampant, that breadth of knowledge requirements are minimal, that graduation rates are low, and that employment … Read more
The joys of Christmas do not include coping with crowds at shopping malls or wracking your brains trying to figure out what to get as a gift for someone who already seems to have everything. Books are a way out of both situations. You don’t even have to go to a bookstore, with books … Read more
“The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe. ” So wrote Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” This single sentence in brief summarized the whole of the controversy in religious circles over … Read more
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about Newt Gingrich, as he leads in polls for the Republican presidential nomination nationally and in Iowa and South Carolina, and may be threatening Mitt Romney’s lead in New Hampshire. One is that he is an autodidact. A second is that he has incredible perseverance. … Read more