Who killed the American Dream? David Leonhardt, a senior writer at The New York Times, picks up his magnifying glass and investigates in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. Note the past tense in the title. In order to find the culprit, we must first learn about the deceased. What was the American Dream? As Leonhardt notes, while the range of definitions is vast, at its root, the American dream is about progress. In particular, he zeroes in on a “core part” of the dream, that children will lead better lives than their parents did. Leonhardt makes the definition … [Read More...] about Whither the American Dream?
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Stuck in the Middle With You
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote in “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his The Road to Serfdom: It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off—than on any positive […]
Battle Cry in the Culture War
Let’s start with a quick quiz. Name this book: The United States is in great peril because it has abandoned its Christian roots and is being taken over by people who are immersed in a humanistic worldview which is antithetical to God. The result will be a tyranny which will oppress Good Christians everywhere. Trick […]
Crafting a New Evangelical Imagination
“All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.”Russell […]
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So, You Want to Pray Like a Jesuit?
What is a book? When is a book not really a book? Before now, I thought I knew; that doesn’t seem like a terribly complicated question after all. War and Peace is a book. So is Thus Spake Zarathustra. So is Go, Dog. Go! But what about a lengthy instruction manual for a Television? It’s […]
Make the Holy Roman Empire Great Again
For the last year, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen has been one of those books of the moment in conservative intellectual circles. (No, conservative intellectual is not an oxymoron. I know you thought that. The joke was already old in the 1960s.) The first thing to note about the book’s title is that the […]
Is the Religious Right Really so Incomprehensible?
Sometimes it seems like discussions in this country are taking place in two isolated camps. Every now and then, that suspicion seems like a certainty. As an example, I offer you Benjamin Friedman’s new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Friedman, a Harvard economics professor, was faced with a seemingly incomprehensible phenomenon: “the puzzling behavior […]