Scott P. Richert

Latest by Scott P. Richert in Chronicles

• Columns

  July 2019

  The Word Remains

  The last time I visited John Lukacs at Pickering Close, his home just outside of Phoenixville, Penn., he greeted me in Hungarian. My knowledge of that language is confined to goulash and paprikash and the proper pronunciation of Budapest, so I was a bit unsettled as we made our way to his library, and John offered me a chair, still in Hungarian.

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• Columns

  May 2019

  Sufficient to the Day

  I take a lot of pictures. I am old enough to have spent thousands of dollars on film and photo developing over three decades, from my late single digits up until about the age of 35.

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• Columns

  April 2019

  Returning to Earth

  What lies at the root of the abstractionism that I discussed last month, which afflicts the modern world like a mania, especially here in the United States? Walker Percy dubbed the phenomenon angelism, by which he did not mean that those who exhibit it have evolved to a state of moral purity but that we have individually and collectively cut ourselves loose mentally from the ties that bind us to the world and the people around us.

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• Columns

  March 2019

  Life Is Not a Fantasy

  The reality of place has weighed heavily on me from a very young age. My knowledge of self has always been inseparable from the place in which I live.

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• Columns

  February 2019

  Picture This

  Last year, just before his 21st birthday, my son Jacob learned of a condition called aphantasia. In its strictest form, aphantasia is the inability to create mental images.

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• Columns

  January 2019

  Pontius Pilate, Ora Pro Nobis

  To the leaders of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960’s, self-censorship was as dangerous as the social enforcement of civility by private organizations and by public educational institutions, and those social norms were, in turn, just as destructive as attempts by government to limit the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

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• Columns

  December 2018

  Quod Scripsi, Scripsi

  Words have meaning. We live our lives, for the most part, in a world in which, on a clear spring day, one can say, “The sky is blue,” and everyone else will cheerfully agree (or wonder why you’re bothering to state the obvious).

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• Columns

  November 2018

  A Generation in Need of Editing

  As I noted last month, conservatives in the United States have long ceded the realms of literature and art (here broadly construed to include all forms of imaginative media, including music, theater, and film) to the forces of the left.

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• Columns

  October 2018

  Drain the Swamp

  The most remarkable aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s performance at the 2018 Tony Awards wasn’t what he said or that he said it, but the unanimous acclaim with which it was greeted by both the assembled audience and those who viewed it at home.

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• Columns

  August 2018

  Hungry Heart

  The Hollywood elite has been painfully boring and predictable for decades, and the use of awards ceremonies to deliver political messages is nothing new. But like everything else in the Age of Trump (with the exception of civility), this behavior has been taken up a notch.

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• Columns

  July 2018

  The Telegraph and the Clothesline

  Communication, in the abstract, is easier today than it has ever been before, largely because of the advance of technology.

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• Columns

  June 2018

  Can We Talk?

  A few months after we moved to Huntington, Indiana, I was inducted into the Cosmopolitan Club, one of the country’s oldest extant discussion societies. Chartered on January 18, 1894, the Cosmopolitan Club convenes on the fourth Tuesday of every month from September through May.

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• Columns

  May 2018

  Alien Nation

  The idea of a nation (natio) that is rootless—not tied to a particular land (patria)—is an absurdity. It is the flip side of the idea of a “nation of immigrants,” which arose in the late 19th century and took hold on the American imagination between the two world wars.

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• Columns

  April 2018

  The Quest for Community

  The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily or applied by others—is that they are inherently limiting. Robert Nisbet is often described as a sociologist or a libertarian, and sometimes as a libertarian sociologist, depending on what the person labeling Nisbet desires to emphasize.

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• Columns

  March 2018

  Welcome Back, Potter

  Several years ago, aided by the wonders of modern technology and the principle of fair use, a number of people independently produced remixes of It’s a Wonderful Life as a horror movie.

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• Columns

  February 2018

  Freedom From Obligation

  For many Americans at or near the mid-century mark of their lives, Frank Capra has shaped their understanding of the meaning of Christmas in a way that only Charles Dickens could possibly rival.

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• Blog

  January 4, 2018

  Sophistory

  Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role).

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• Columns

  January 2018

  Get Big or Get Out

  Most people think of E.F. Schumacher today (to the extent that they think of him at all) as some sort of vaguely leftist harbinger of the environmentalist movement.

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• Columns

  December 2017

  Chronicles of Culture

  For there to be a “context of social relationships,” there must be at least two people. And those people must be part of a society, because that is what social, as an adjective, not only implies but demands, the fantasy worlds constructed by Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams notwithstanding.

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• Columns

  November 2017

  Breeding Mosquitos

  “Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.” That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies. Burnham died while Reagan was still in office! What did he know about problems?

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