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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Looking Anew at the Progressives
If you want to make sense of the Presidential Election, then you should definitely pick up Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit. The Progressive Movement has been much discussed by pundits and intellectuals in the last decade. Much discussed. Suddenly the word “progressive” became chic in some circles. It became anathema in other circles This […]
The Undesired Crossroad
Sometimes you are faced with a really lousy set of options. Sometimes that lousy set of options is your own fault. Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor wrestles with exactly that problem. A brilliant book. Just brilliant. You won’t forget it. First though, we need to straighten one thing out. This book is called a screenplay. Don’t […]
The Cult of Heinlein
“Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old ‘branching time streams’ and ‘multiple universes’ notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup?” The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein raises that […]