Philosophical Fragments
Whether or not your college years will be "the best years of your life," they will almost certainly be among the most transformative. The question is whether that transformation will be for the better. Read more
Whether or not your college years will be "the best years of your life," they will almost certainly be among the most transformative. The question is whether that transformation will be for the better. Read more
News broke around midday today that a lone gunman had opened fire inside the Washington DC offices of the Family Research Council. Little was known about the shooter, the security guard who was shot, or the reason behind the shooting. I’m actually able to report some new details, having spoken with a source close to FRC. Although I have great confidence in the source, I’m not able to verify these details independently, so it’s always possible that corrections or other... Read more
Comparing Olympic athletes across different sports is a tricky and subjective business -- because not all gold medals are equal. Determining the greatest Olympian ever is not as simple as asking who won the most golds. Read more
I grew up with a seven-foot print of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, from the Sistine Chapel, on the wall above my bed. I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, a novelized version of Michelangelo’s life, twice in high school and once again in college. I read deeply on Leonardo Da Vinci, both for his scientific and his artistic genius. I knew it wasn’t the hippest era amongst the highbrow set, but I always loved the art of the renaissance... Read more
Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian in he modern incarnation of the Olympic Games. But is he the "greatest Olympian" ever? It's partly a question of definitions, but I would argue that he is not. Read more
At last the general election contest is truly underway. We have two full tickets, the conventions are drawing near, and we’re rounding mid-August and headed for September. Let the vilification of Mitt Romney’s choice for Vice President begin. Paul Ryan is a confident and mature choice for several reasons. Romney could have gone for a more charismatic figure, and one who is practically custom designed to appeal to a certain demographic and lock down a must-win state, like Marco Rubio.... Read more
Having just returned from a family mini-vacation in the north Georgia mountains, I discovered that my post on “Gabby Douglas, Jeremy Lin, and the God of Parking Spots” had generated some conversation. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com had criticized Douglas, the newly crowned all-around Olympic champion, for what one writer has called a facile faith in “The God of Parking Spaces,” or a God who rewards us with the ideal parking space because we prayed piously. It struck many as... Read more
My friend David French posts at French Revolution about journalistic snark directed toward Gabby Douglas and her professions of faith in the midst of her dazzling Olympic gold-medal-winning performance in the all-around at the London Games. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon wrote: As a Christian myself (albeit one of those really freaky papist kinds), I’ve often wondered what it is about Christians like Douglas that unnerves me so. The closest I’ve been able to figure it is that Douglas and her ilk seem... Read more
I first met Dominique Moceanu when we traveled together to the Junior Pan American Games in 1992 in Sao Paolo, Brazil. I was fifteen and had recently won my first junior national all-around title. We had originally been bound for Rio de Janeiro, but the organizers made some planning errors and moved us to Sao Paolo, where we stayed in a not-so-wholesome area. Wherever we went, we were escorted by guards with Uzis, and we were warned not to leave... Read more
Os Guinness is one of the premier orators and cultural critics in the western world today, and his latest book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future, speaks to the demise of the proper American concept of liberty. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, is a foreign-born admirer of the audacity and genius of the American experiment. A Free People’s Suicide examines American society and its slow and disastrous drift away from its historic moorings. The following is the... Read more
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