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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Rebuilding the Moral-Cultural Order
Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is a curiously neglected work these days. While it was published in 1982 and has much that is specific to the debates of that era, the underling argument is curiously relevant to a contemporary debate about the nature of a Good Society. How important was the book in […]
Personal Legends: Yours and Mine
“And what went wrong when other alchemists tried to make gold and were unable to do so?” “They were only looking for gold,” his companion answered. “They were seeking the treasure of their Personal Legend, without wanting actually to live out the Personal Legend.” Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is a tale of a journey. It […]
The Canary in the Fed’s Coal Mine
Timing is everything. Imagine publishing a book two weeks before a major crisis that is perfectly explained in its pages. Jeanna Smialek just did that. If you want to understand the financial crisis slowly unfolding right now, you can do no better than to read Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of […]