"Christmas and the Boy Reader"—my new Christmas piece in the Free Beacon:

"There are still boys and still books. Still boys who read. But hard to find anymore is the culturally accepted category of the boy reader, the bright little kid who… /1
freebeacon.com/culture/christ… who inhales books like oxygen—'reading as if for life,' in Dickens's description of the young David Copperfield—and wants to know everything: living in books every life, feeling in characters every emotion. The little boy who needs to grasp the world.

"This is something…/2

It was while thinking about Marion Montgomery’s work, when he died in 2011, that I posed for myself most clearly the question of why the conservative project of the 1940s and 1950s intellectuals and artists failed. /1 I once asked Ralph McInerny why the 1950s “Catholic Renaissance” of Flannery O’Connor faltered in the 1960s, and he answered that it was nothing intrinsic. He and his fellows in the next generation “just weren’t good enough. And that’s an answer, I suppose. /2

A Baptist university once asked me to teach a master-class in writing—but first I had to answer this: "Please summarize the development of your own personal Christian faith and commitment, including your understanding of salvation and your relationship with Jesus Christ." /1 Here's the answer—not very Baptist, but what's a Catholic boy to do?—I gave:

I affirm all elements of the Nicene Creed, as I have since I was young. I understand salvation as a grace offered to us through active acceptance of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection.… /2

Years ago, in a debate at a midwestern university, I suggested to an angry law professor that there was a profound asymmetry between our desired politics.

If I ruled the world, she would be what she was: a loud but ignorable minor law professor. If she ruled the world… /1 I would be at least banned from teaching and probably in jail for having illegal views. She took great offense, declaring that I had defamed not just her but all the left-leaning audience members.

The thing is, I hadn't. It was true then, and it's true now /2