Tender anecdotes about elite all-boys’ schools have ignited efforts to expand single-sex education to Americans from all backgrounds. But there’s another side of the story.
Books, Culture & the Arts
Posted inBooks
The Sexual Counterrevolution
The sexual revolution brought excess as well as progress. In the aftermath of AIDS, a new puritanism threatens to repeal both.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Essay: Web of Paradox
The language of our emerging digital culture suggests adventure, daring, and unprecedented novelty, while we sit comfortably at our desks, alone, communing with our computer screens. Are we being taken in by our own metaphors?
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Screening a La Carte
Instead of a single TV rating system, why not let the PTA and the Christian Coalition — and anyone else — create their own?
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Politics of Sanctimony
George W. Bush and God Himself are on notice: “The Democratic Party is going to take back God this time,” Gore operative Elaine Kamarck announced a few months ago as the vice president made his play for the Almighty. He declared his disdain for “hollow secularism,” his support for state funding of sectarian social service […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Corrosive Politics of Virtue
Decrying moral failure is an old American tradition that goes back to the Puritans. But the moral diagnosis is wrong — and it brings pernicious political consequences.
Posted inBooks
The Tocqueville Files: The Other Civic America
Despite fears of civic decline, the United States remains the country with the highest rate of volunteering. The explanation may be America’s web of religious affiliations.
Posted inBooks
Unholy Alliance
I t is easier to believe that God is in heaven and all’s right with the world than it is to imagine an irreverent politician questioning whether there is a God in heaven or any benefit to prayer. Even political theorists and commentators, right and left, are apt to shrink from criticizing religious belief or […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Is God a Republican?: Why Politics Is Dangerous for Religion
The Christian Coalition has made a dangerous gamble by associating faith with the Republican Party. If God blesses us only as Republicans or Democrats, both politics and religion are in trouble.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
State of the Debate: Defining Democracy Down
Must the Catholic Church admit women as priests? Must families with children or pets be allowed to live in every homeowners’ association? These questions are even more complicated than they first appear.