Sublime

Today, the need for healing has never been greater. America, along with most of the rest of the modern world, is demoralized and confused. Multiple indexes of global unhappiness have surged over the last fifteen years. It is not hardship that causes this misery, but hardship without purpose. We feel disconnected in space from our broader communitie

Today’s rising generation (Millennials) is taking the lead in insisting on more civic control, which almost guarantees that Americans will spend the rest of the Crisis era pulling these strong institutions back into their lives.

a modern society in which the natural sciences and bureaucratic rationality had conspired to undermine confidence in religious values and traditional sources of meaning.

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, i

If their adventure with the New Deal had been a combination of idealism, glamour and ambition, it was ambition that proved to be the lasting element.

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life. Par

The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist

changing culture and the quality of individual lives,