Memorial Day was first instituted in the aftermath of the Civil War, to appease the suffering caused by the terrible bloodshed of that conflict, in which almost as many men died as in the wars of the 20th century combined. Continue Reading...
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May 21, 2026
Online Sports Gambling and Virtue
When a pastor I know told me about “an issue ruining marriages” in his congregation, I assumed he was going to describe a spate of financial trouble, a string of faithlessness, typical marital discord. Continue Reading...
May 20, 2026
Free Trade and the Rule of Law
Imagine a neighborhood that has experienced high crime rates for years. A local “neighborhood watch” group forms, but it only talks about resolutions without taking any action. Criminals are found guilty but then immediately released back onto the streets to continue their illicit activities. Continue Reading...
May 19, 2026
Our Glorious Founding Document
Bad history books litter the shelves of classrooms, bookstores, and libraries everywhere. Beyond mere factual inaccuracies, bad works of history also pretend to neutrality, prefer a Marxist materialism to messy human motivations, and misalign the significance of events. Continue Reading...
May 14, 2026
Why Postliberalism Failed
(This essay is one of two forewords to James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes’s forthcoming Why Postliberalism Failed, published by the Acton Institute. Preorder here.)
In the fall of 2017, I was invited to attend the Ramsey Colloquium in Washington, a gathering convened by R.R. Continue Reading...
May 13, 2026
The Technocratic State and the Last Frontier of Freedom
The global discussion on artificial intelligence has ceased to be a technical debate and has become a first-rate political conflict. In 2024, the European Union enforced the EU AI Act, the world’s most comprehensive AI regulatory framework, placing strict compliance requirements on developers and companies before their products reach the market. Continue Reading...
May 12, 2026
Evolution and Our Dependence on a Creator
“All these [living] things around us have been seminally and primordially created in the very fabric, as it were, or texture of the elements; but they require the right occasion actually to emerge into being.”—Augustine Continue Reading...
May 07, 2026
Washington the Great
What made George Washington so great? This is the question asked by H.W. Brands in the last chapter of his new biography, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. If one made a list of qualities that make an effective leader, Washington would check a lot of boxes: He was brave, diligent, resourceful, and inspiring. Continue Reading...
May 06, 2026
When Public Language Stops Telling the Truth
One of the most familiar sounds in Nigeria is not the generator humming through a blackout or the impatient horn in standstill traffic. It is the shrug that follows obvious failure. Continue Reading...
May 05, 2026
Practical Action in an Age of Decadence
Roger Scruton often wrote of oikophobia, the phenomenon, so prevalent in the modern West, of distrusting one’s own home, society, and cultural inheritance. The culture of repudiation is one-directional, however, valorizing “the other” at the expense of ourselves—we can do no right while they can do no wrong. Continue Reading...
