Published in print

I watched the Towers burn on 9/11 from where I lived, three miles away. At Chronicles Magazine I comment on how it seemed and how it seems.

What happens when the big city shuts down? I discuss at Chronicles Magazine.

I discuss Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement at Chronicles Magazine.

I consider the legacy of Robert Nisbet at Chronicles Magazine.

Comments on nation-building and religion in ancient lands at Chronicles Magazine.

My comments on a recent book about Darwinian evolution can be read at Chronicles Magazine.

In the current Chronicles I review Tony Esolen’s new book Out of the Ashes.

I have an (unfavorable) piece on the current papacy in the May issue of Chronicles.

Here’s a talk I gave to the H. L. Mencken Club a couple weeks ago, published at Crisis Magazine.

I have a piece in the August issue of Chronicles about what’s needed in view of the populist upsurge symbolized by Trump’s rise and most recently Brexit.

I give an explanation of the Trump phenomenon at Chronicles Magazine.

I have an essay in the current First Things on the current political and social situation and how to respond to it. The whole thing is available here.

[The following review appeared in the December, 2014 issue of Chronicles:]

This is a history of liberalism as it appears to an intelligent, well-informed, and thoroughly convinced English liberal who worked for many years as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. It is useful as a sympathetic exploration of the stages through which the political outlook that rules us today has advanced.

The following essay appears in the December, 2014 First Things:

[The following review appeared in the June, 2014 issue of Chronicles:]

We have been enduring the cultural revolution of liberal modernity. It is hard to say exactly when that revolution began, but it took a great step forward in the 60’s, when social and religious tradition lost its last shreds of public authority, and another after the collapse of communism freed it to go wherever it wanted without a serious external check.

The following review of Robert P. George’s Conscience and Its Enemies appeared in the October 2013 Chronicles:

The following review of Garry’s Will’s Why Priests? appeared in the June 2013 Chronicles:

Garry Wills identifies himself as a Christian. He says he accepts the creeds, along with prayer, divine providence, the Gospels, the Eucharist, and the Mystical Body of Christ as the body of all believers. He thinks it a bad thing that “article by article, parts of the Creed are fading from some churches.” He also identifies as a Catholic, and tells us he prays the rosary and is devoted to the saints.

Here’s an essay from the current issue of Modern Age that’s been posted at the Intercollegiate Review website. It gives an architectonic account of all possible political positions in present-day America that explains the necessity and awkward status of social conservatism. The piece started out as a lecture I gave a couple of years ago at a Catholic conference and then shortened and made a bit less papist to fit into an officially non-Catholic publication.

I’ve got a new book out, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It develops some of the arguments from The Tyranny of Liberalism and applies them in a more focused way to debunk our supreme moral principle, or what now seems to count as such. Since it’s published by a Catholic press I could get more specific about the principles for keeping the various aspects of human relations in balance other than attempting to suppress one or another of them because it might cause trouble.

That’s the title of an essay I wrote that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.