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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Evil Jeeves
A plot summary:A young gentleman of dubious intellectual capacity with no discernable means of income has a valet who is extraordinarily brilliant. Said valet is capable of designing ingenious scheme to enable his master to attain seemingly impossible aims. The story is told with great wit. It is incredibly amusing despite the fact (or maybe […]
Wright’s Unbearable Rage
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! That is truly one of the great rallying cries of all time. (Trivia note: as you know, Patrick Henry is the source of that line. But, he probably cribbed it from Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy which has the lines: “It is not now time to talk of […]
The Quest for Answers
During graduation weekend, I gave a talk encouraging the students to never cease asking the important questions in life. Questions like: Does your life have a purpose? What is a Good life? A student stopped by the next day to talk about it. She was worried. How could she possibly ever find a definitive answer […]