Paul Tuns: There is a scene near the end of Billy Madison in which the title character played by Adam Sandler compares the Industrial Revolution to a puppy. Astonished at the vacuity of the answer, the principal who posed the question said: “What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Timothy P. Carney (Harper, $36.99, 343 pages) Invariably, it seems, Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly and Brad Wilcox’s Get Married are getting reviewed together. Not here. Both are deserving of their own treatment. The Wilcox review will appear next month. Carney, a Catholic father of [...]
All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism by Kevin Vallier (Oxford, $36, 305 pages) Version 1.0.0 Kevin Vallier has set out to reply to the integralist challenge to liberalism in his important 2023 volume, All the Kingdoms of the World. Vallier takes a dozen pages to define integralism but if it can be summarized in [...]
Paul Tuns The Vatican has once again muddied the waters of Catholic moral teaching with the release of Fiducia Supplicans – On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings, which was widely reported on the front pages of newspaper and the leads of many news broadcasts as the Roman Catholic Church officially sanctioning the blessing of same-sex unions. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of [...]
From the editor’s desk Two recent books, both published by Broadside Books, delve into the roots of today’s woke ideology to describe its origins and march “through the institutions” as Antonio Gramsci called for: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and The Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania ($39.50, 270 pages) and America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical [...]
Paul Tuns: From the editor's desk Typical headlines on a local crime story read “Nebraska teen who used pills to end pregnancy gets 90 days in jail” (New York Times) and “Nebraska teen sent to jail over illegal abortion” (Rolling Stone). The first is misleading, the second an outright lie. Read the actual news story and one discovers that Celeste Burgess, 18, [...]
From the editor's desk: We have reported in this paper (and to their credit, the corporate media has done a good job covering, too) stories about Canadians being euthanized due to their social circumstances. Men and women, some middle-aged, are choosing to be killed by their doctor because they have trouble paying the rent, live in subsidized housing that does not accommodate [...]
From the editor’s desk: I have noted before that the greatest influence on my thought and writing is George F. Will, but he has not the only writers to guide my political thinking and career choice. Two others were the historian Paul Johnson and journalist Patrick J. Buchanan. In January, we lost Johnson who died at the age of 94 and Buchanan, [...]
From the editor’s desk Paul Tuns I read a lot and many of the books I read get reviewed in these pages, either in longer reviews or essays under my byline or as unsigned brief reviews. But there are many that I can’t get around to writing a review about and I want to let you know about several of them, and [...]
Paul Tuns: In July, the United Nations’ Population Division predicted that on Nov. 15, global population would hit 8 billion people. Let us be among the first to wish the newborn baby boy or girl, probably born in Africa, the Middle East, or south Asia, a happy birth day and welcome to the human family. Typically, the UN’s population estimates come with [...]
Paul Tuns: In 2017, the British journalist David Goodhart coined the theory of Somewheres and Anywheres to describe those who were grounded to the place they were born (and were generally more politically and personally conservative) and those who see themselves as citizens of the world (and were generally more politically and personally liberal). Somewheres usually outnumber Anywheres but Anywheres have outsized [...]
Paul Tuns: A CNN report on the May 23 mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school began, “we may never know why a shooter gunned down 19 children and two teachers in a massacre Tuesday at Robb Elementary School …” Not specifically, no. Reasonable explanations often betray such evil acts. But it is not impossible to diagnose the moral muck from [...]
From the editor's desk: I had planned to use this column to write about the Uvalde school shooting in Texas on May 18, and how it ties back to abortion and other cultural rot. I’m postponing that essay because this issue is jam-packed with a lot of “heavy” material. Instead, I return to covering a miscellany of events as is my usual [...]
From the editor’s desk: Cook at Mercatornet made an excellent point about the abortion debate in the United States following the leak of a Supreme Court decision that indicates that the five-decade old Roe decision is about to be overturned: the pro-abortion side is going to have to learn to debate their position. For nearly five decades, the pro-abortion side has been [...]
From the editor’s desk: You probably saw that during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, she refused to answer what a woman is. Joe Biden appointed Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman, the sole qualification Biden outlined for his first Supreme Court appointment when he was running for president. Asked if she agreed with the late Justice [...]