A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of King College in Bristol, TN. It’s a strange, rather daunting genre. I took brevity to be one of the primary virtues of such a talk. And given that I was in the middle of David Foster…
As I mentioned before, I recently guest-edited an issue of Comment magazine which we dubbed, “Letters to the Young.” There are still some issues available for purchase. My contribution, beyond the editorial, was a letter to young parents. My wife and I have been married over 20 years and are the proud parents of 4…
It turns out Britain and the United States–those two countries long divided by a common language–nonetheless share a common pastime: lamenting the lack of influence of public intellectuals while romanticizing the role of ideas in France. As John Naughton puts it in his Observer essay, “Why don’t we love our intellectuals?” (available at the Guardian),…
[I will no doubt regret this, but a 5-hour layover in Atlanta will make one do all kinds of regrettable things.] So, I guess there’s been a little buzz about my earlier post on the so-called “new universalism.” Some people clearly have a lot of time on their hands. Otherwise, why on earth would someone…
You might not have known this, but the nation to our north just completed a federal election. Not a lot of hype–the election was only announced about 5 weeks ago, so don’t feel badly if you missed it. The Conservative government established a solid majority, thus relinquishing the ball-and-chain of a coalition government. No big…
NPR’s All Things Considered had a marvelous little segment on Brother Claude Ely, a backcountry Pentecostal preacher who’s probably impacted you more than you might realize. You probably already know some of Brother Claude’s work if you’ve heard Johnny Cash’s haunting rendition of “Ain’t No Grave” on American VI, or if you heard it playing…