Public Writings

Cultura Animi 4 (2021) In this disturbing year of 2020, I find that I have to be careful what I read before going to bed. To get a good...

Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2020 I don’t find the word “hyperpartisanship” in any dictionary. It’s not in the  Oxford English...

American Affairs  4.4 (Winter, 2020)   There is something a little unsettling about a nation that deliberately sets about increasing its...

First Things , November 1, 2020   The words “piety” and “pious” have an archaic ring; moderns find them hard to use without irony or a...

Law & Liberty, October 5. 2020 It was about fifteen years ago, I believe, that I first became aware that “classical liberalism” was a...

The New Criterion , October 2020   (On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)   Abraham Lincoln had...

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 19, 2020 I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a...

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, August 19, 2020 I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a...

Law & Liberty, August 3, 2020 The combination of election year politics with the demonstrations and riots following the brutal killing of...

The Spectator (World) , August 31, 2020 Fall Newsletter Our Director, Eustace Stockstill, introduces the Fall issue.    Dear fellow...

Quillette, July 29, 2020 It is a striking feature of our historical moment that vast numbers of cultural institutions, universities and...

The Wall Street Journal , June 29, 2020   (On the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)   At the end of the Civil War, on April 11,...

Church Life Journal, June 24, 2020 Some readers may be puzzled to see the term “secularity” in the title of this essay in place of the...

Law & Liberty, June 11, 2020 It will probably take many years before we will be able to grasp fully the devastation left behind by 2020’s...

Law & Liberty, June 4, 2020 If you had just arrived in America for the first time in early March of this year from, say, the steppes of...

The New Criterion , June 2020   Poor Raphael! This year, the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, was to have been his year of glory....

First Things, June 1, 2020 Human beings have always yearned to know the future, and there have always been other human beings who claimed...

Quillette , May 24, 2020   Fear has been making some pretty foolish policy decisions in the last few months. In the US, the decision of...

The Wall Street Journal , April 10, 2020   (On Raphael’s “Transfiguration”)   Late in 1519, the great Renaissance artist Raphael faced a...

Quillette, March 28, 2020 One of the comforts of studying history is that, no matter how bad things get, you can always find a moment in...