As Charles Dickens wrote about Victorian England in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

I’ll admit it: I’m biased. I attended a religiously-affiliated undergraduate college, and then went to a Catholic graduate school, and spent my career teaching at schools with religious missions.

My friend James Matthew Wilson recently wrote an essay over at Public Discourse that highlights an essential issue we rarely spend time discussing: the need to belong.

How could Gerald Ford, a fiscally conservative Republican, work with the liberal Democrats of his generation led by John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Tip O’Neill?

The American founders were acutely aware that human beings desire power. Like Lord Acton, they believed that power tends to have a corrupting effect on those not only who attain it but those who reach for it.

Over the past decades, the controversy over civics education in the United States has only gotten worse.

One of the more tiresome tropes that has emerged over the last seven years is the phrase “a threat to our democracy.”

Like an atom, a polity consists of different elements, one of which is that there has to be some underlying principle of unity.

Perhaps the most remarkable Boy Scout Annual Awards Dinner in scouting history took place at the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, DC, on the evening of December 2, 1974.

The 14^th Amendment is back in the news, which typically means something is afoot somewhere in this country, but is also an opportunity to review one of the most important provisions in our Constitution

In all the handwringing over so-called “populism,” much can be gleaned about our current politics when certain groups see their inferiors as exercising the franchise in the wrong way…

This series concerns itself with our American heritage, and in particular to make contemporary readers more appreciative of the “blessings of liberty” that have been vouchsafed to us.

During the bleakest days of the Covid pandemic and the shutdowns, numerous voices exhorted us to practice kindness.

This panic-inducing headline from a recent story in the NYTimes found analogues in most stories that reported on the recent release of national civics and history tests administered to 8th graders.

We do violence to a work of art by using it for our own ends, especially for our own ideological or political ends, which are time-bound and probably transient at best.

America is facing demographic decline. Whether it rises to the level of a crisis is open to debate (although you can put me squarely in the “uh oh” camp, and not only because I’m in my 60’s and devoid of grandchildren, which, in historical terms, is an anomaly of a high order).

One of the first lessons we learn in the Bible is that it is not good for man to be alone.

We’ve drawn the reader’s attention in a prior essay to Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address,” one of his more interesting speeches.

Back in October we at the Ford Leadership Forum partnered with Baylor University to host an event on fragility and resilience.

My freshman year in college a professor placed in my hands G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, and my life was never the same after.