At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

President Obama’s decision to have himself surrounded with school children as he announced his “proposals” to deal with “gun violence” on Wednesday caused a lot of hand wringing among his opponents.  “Demagogic,” “offensive,” “disgusting,” and “shameless” were just some of the adjectives used to describe it. I have no interest in defending Obama.  Anyone with…

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was a liberal Democrat’s fantasy.  In this fourth and final installment of the film franchise launched by Richard Donner, Christopher Reeve’s Man of Steel rids the planet of all of its nuclear weapons by rounding them up and launching them into the heart of the sun.  The nations of…

It has been quite some time since the fictional character, Rocky Balboa, has achieved the stature of a cultural icon.  Sylvester Stallone’s hugely successful film franchise has his beloved “Italian Stallion” exchanging blows with one adversary after the other.  Yet Stallone has repeatedly insisted over the decades since the debut of the original Rocky that…

The view that “racism” is limited to the prejudices of individuals and/or the discriminatory policies of the government dies hard.  Those who have thought longest and hardest on the evil of racism—the “experts”—have been telling us for quite some time that racism contaminates the very institutions or “structures” of Western civilization.  The philosopher Richard Wasserstrom…

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The view that “racism” is limited to the prejudices of individuals and/or the discriminatory policies of the government dies hard.  Those who have thought longest and hardest on the evil of racism—the “experts”—have been telling us for quite some time that racism contaminates the very institutions or “structures” of Western civilization.  The philosopher Richard Wasserstrom…

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio is being talked about quite a bit as a likely presidential candidate for 2016.  The word among many Republicans is that Rubio’s is among the faces of the new wave, the next generation, of genuinely “conservative” politicians.  As is all too typically the case nowadays, the word is a lie.…

Neoconservative Republicans are none too pleased by President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to the position of Secretary of Defense.  Anyone who has been listening to neoconservative talk radio for the last couple of days, or reading such neoconservative publications as The Weekly Standard and National Review, is all too familiar with the litany of…

As the members of America’s “conservative” party struggle to get a hold of themselves following this past election, they should revisit—or visit—the thought of modern conservatism’s “patron saint,” Edmund Burke.   If anything distinguishes conservatism from other brands of political thought it is its affirmation of tradition.  This Burke makes clear.  This attachment to tradition,…

In his most recent piece, the widely respected Thomas Sowell remarks upon the GOP’s decades long insistence upon nominating “ad hoc moderates”—like Mitt Romney—as their presidential candidates—even though these moderates unfailingly “get beaten by even vulnerable, unknown or discredited Democrats.”  Sowell expresses what appears to be the consensus among many in talk radio, to say…

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