February 2009
Marriage in America—March 2009
PERSPECTIVE
Self-Evident Lies
by Thomas Fleming
VIEWS
Mainline Marital Mélange
by William Murchison
When the culture preaches to the church.
Immigration and Marriage in America
by R. Cort Kirkwood
Beyond definitions.
Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
Romancing the self.
Patriarch Aleksy, R.I.P.
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79.
Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his theological studies in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) three years later, and was tonsured in 1961. His subsequent rise through the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church—allegedly facilitated by a KGB connection, which he always denied—culminated in his election as Patriarch in 1990.
Rendering Unto Lincoln
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death. In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct. We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before Lincoln’s disciples degraded the currency—and his grandiose monument in Washington, with a grotesque statue by the Transcendentalist sculptor-politician Daniel Chester French.
The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!”
—Robert Burns
A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.
Wait a minute.
Obama as Lincoln: Mask and Mirror
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the high forehead, biblical beard, and absurd ears of the Great Emancipator.
Lincoln and God
Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord. But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, and inevitable deaf power which moved as an omnipotent force evidently harassed and worried him.”
Shattering Lincoln’s Dream
I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter. The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement. Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as I once was.
Lincolnism Today: The Long Marriage of Centralized Power and Concentrated Wealth
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state can and should use its coercive apparatus to serve the narrow interests of an economic elite at the expense of the commonwealth, prevailed decisively in the War of Secession and during the decades that followed, with high tariffs, railroad subsidies, and the apportionment of public lands.
THE LEGACY OF LINCOLN—February 2009
PERSPECTIVE
Rendering Unto Lincoln
by Thomas Fleming
VIEWS
The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue
by Clyde Wilson
Abe’s indulgence.
Obama as Lincoln
by Justin Raimondo
Mask and mirror.
Lincolnism Today
by Daniel Larison
The long marriage of centralized power and concentrated wealth.
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