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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The Praise of Folly
“If someone should attempt to take off the masks and costumes of the actors in a play and show to the audience their real appearances, would he not ruin the whole play?… For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director […]
I Am Who You Perceive
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” That is Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night. The […]
Do We Need Children?
Do children serve any purpose in life besides the obvious propagation of the species? Obviously, we need children in order to make adults. But, do these societal leeches serve any purpose before weaning themselves of the bloodstream of the community and becoming productive members of it? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story (using the word “story” loosely) “Little […]