Free Republic

Another Thanksgiving is upon us. But it’s amazing how ungrateful people can be these days. One comedian quipped, “My grandfather tried to warn everyone that the Titanic was going to sink. Besides not believing him, they also expelled him from the movie theater!”

Is life a matter of grand politics or individual souls? Can human affairs be boiled down to science or theories? Tolstoy and Chekhov believed: Life is lived at ordinary moments, and what is most real is what is barely noticeable, like the tiniest movements of consciousness. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another. It is lived only where these tiny, tiny infinitesimally small changes occur. American conservatives can learn much from the great literary output of 19th century Russia. Though seemingly distant in time and place, the...

“If there is no God, everything is permitted”, wrote Dostoyevsky. Yet he underestimated the despotic potential of godless modernity. It imposes its own taboos, and they may well be more numerous than those imposed by Christendom. They certainly are different because their purpose is. Judaeo-Christianity saw man as sinful but capable of becoming better. Both its prescriptions and proscriptions were issued to signpost the road to self-improvement in this world and salvation in the next. The original commandments were chiselled in stone literally, the later ones figuratively, but there was no room left for misinterpretation in either case. Modernity sees...

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou       Beside me singing in the Wilderness — And Wilderness is Paradise enow. - Omar Khayyám I tell you what, I’ll provide the bread, and the wine - left over from the Flyover Fest.Gerard provides the verse – in narrative form. About paradise. Enjoy. Life is so much more than politics. “This job began in the winter and the only source of heat Miss Helen had was a standard issue wood stove that she also used for cooking. The stove...

The 19th Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about characters who justified murder in the name of their ideological beliefs. For this reason, John Gray argues, he's remained relevant ever since, through the rise of the totalitarian states of the 20th Century, to the "war against terror". When Fyodor Dostoyevsky described in his novels how ideas have the power to change human lives, he knew something of what he was writing about. Born in 1821, the Russian writer was in his 20s when he joined a circle of radical intellectuals in St Petersburg who were entranced by French utopian socialist...

Today we see an age of anomie—lawlessness. The laws of God are being ignored and His commandments jettisoned. Indeed, it is a lawless age in which we live—reminiscent of what Jesus said in parable about what would come when He went off to a far country. The citizens would hate Him, and they would cry out, “We will not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14). The great question before the nations is: Will men and nations submit to having Jesus Christ, the Divine Creator of the world reign over them? God’s purpose in this world is to...

BADEN-BADEN, Germany — Who was the man hanging around the roulette table in the casino in this historic hot-springs resort? He had a black shirt, tie and jacket over black jeans and a two-day stubble, like some of his companions. He looked like a member of the Russian mafia. Or, he might have been a Russian pediatrician escaping his family for a few days, or one of Moscow's new tycoons, or a tycoon's bodyguard. Anyway, he was speaking Russian with his friends, and therefore exemplified a new trend in Baden-Baden, whose image seems inconsistent with anything new. After the better...

The state of Alabama still carries the guilt and shame of its legacy of oppression in the civil rights wars of the twentieth century. Images can be recalled at a moment's notice. Bull Connor and his vicious police dogs. George Wallace barring the entrance to the University of Alabama with an axe. Martin Luther King, Jr. writing from a Birmingham jail cell. The place called "the heart of Dixie" paid a price for being on the wrong side of history. Atlanta took Birmingham's spot as the capital of Southern economic development and now has a population equivalent to the entire...

What is remarkable about the anniversary of 9-11? For the past year I, personally, have not heard anything new about the attack. The 19 attackers remain 19 unknowns, except for the data on their airline certificates indicating that 15 of them were Saudis. On the other hand, fictions spread by officials, public figures and authors, as well as the "hosts" and "guests" of the mainstream media, are spread today as intensely as a year ago. The root of these fictions is the inability of these officials, public figures, authors and TV hosts and guests to understand suicide sublimated into terrorism....