Toyah

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Exams are over, but work continues. We've got to get the spring issue of the Review to press by the end of the week, and the staff has been working overtime. I don't mind the work, but I haven't been able to relax yet. I think I'll spend next week visiting folks around the state before getting back to work in June.

It is nice, however, to have evenings free again. There's a great new reality show on PBS called Colonial House. It puts a bunch of 21st century Americans and Brits in a scenario reminiscent of the first Puritans at Plymouth. The folks have to live off of supplies like those the colonists would have had while trying to make the colony profitable for its investors by producing a crop of maize (blue indian corn, I think). It's really a terrific show. You can see the last episodes next Monday and Tuesday night, check local listings.

Yesterday evening I celebrated the end of finals by making a visit to my favorite book store. I usually only come away with a book or a magazine (I buy most of my books online), but I love to browse the shelves of the history, biography, and fiction sections. Last night was an exceptionally good night for new finds.

• Joining in on the recent flood of biographies on the Founders, Ron Chernow has a new one out on Alexander Hamilton, faithfully styled, Alexander Hamilton.
• David Hackett Fischer of Albion's Seed fame has a new one on Washington's Crossing the Delaware.
• Martin Gilbert has added D-Day to his list of WWII works.
• Another Colonial tale in Russell Shorto's Island at the Center of the World, on Dutch Manhattan.

Plenty of good summer reading.

Presently, I'm working on Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, with Freedom and Virtue, an ISI anthology of the 19th century's libertarian/conservative debate, on deck. Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander is in the hole. Needless to say, I am very pleased that summer is here!

FRC's Tony Perkins:

[W]hen you mix young people who grew up on a steady diet of MTV and pornography with a prison environment, you get the abuse at Abu Ghraib. America is in a perilous situation. In the eyes of these Muslims we are the enemy because we are Christian, but in many areas of our culture, our conduct as a nation is anything but Christian.

The Greek and Roman philosophers knew it; the Founders knew it; Reagan knew it; most of you know it: America will be great as long as it is good. Should America ever cease to be good, it will cease to be great.

That day, sadly, is upon us.

(Note: Though a version of the above statement is attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, it is not actually found in Democracy in America and his authorship is suspect. This does diminish the statement's truth.)

A kind passerby (see comment on "hale to Google") suggested that I am "absent a few levels of cognitive reasoning" and cited Lawrence Kohlberg as a source. I don't deny the statement. And I happily accept all the criticism I deserve.

Well, being the ignorant but eager student of humanity that I am, I went in search of Mr. Kohlberg and found this in a blog post by Marvin Olasky (EIC of the Christian news magazine World and a journalism prof at Texas):

Some WORLD readers may be familiar with the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who became famous for proclaiming ethical stages through which he thought people should move: from following the law to "social duty" and perhaps to "autonomous ethical thinking," wherein a person makes up his own principles. Kohlberg argued that such ethical autonomy should be the goal of human existence-even though in this stage humans are in some ways the most selfish, virtually inventing a world, totally apart from God.

I'd propose instead of Kohlberg's six or seven stages just three. First comes the glory stage, the I'm-the-center-of-the-world thinking within which we attempt to glorify ourselves. Next comes the glory, glory stage, when we strive to promote not only ourselves but a collective entity as well: perhaps a nation, perhaps a business, perhaps Communism. Our goal, however, should be to move by grace to the highest stage, where we act to bring glory, glory, glory to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (And in the course of glorifying God we may bring honor to ourselves and to our nation or business.)

Education, the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty, indeed!

It is statistically more dangerous to be a liberal member of SCOTUS, according to this in-depth report.