Refighting the Wars of Religion

Do free societies require a “Great Separation” between politics and the biblical tradition?

Johnny U by Tom Callahan

Europe’s Two Culture Wars

What happens when radical relativism meets mass Muslim immigration.

Defending and Advancing Freedom

To commemorate COMMENTARY's 60th anniversary, and in an effort to advance discussion of the present American position in the world, the editors asked 36 leading thinkers to comment on the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy.

The Cathedral and the Cube: Reflections on European Morale

To understand the continent's political incapacity, it helps to look beyond politics.

Has the Supreme Court Gone Too Far?

Have recent rulings by the Supreme Court subverted fundamental elements of our constitutional order? Are there circumstances in which the Supreme Court is justified in reaching beyond its own precedents and the Constitution itself? What (if anything) should be done to contain or roll back the imperial judiciary?

The Morality of War

Does there have to be "another way"? Sometimes, as in Iraq, military force is the better way.

Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould

The Unknown Lenin edited by Richard Pipes

On the Future of Conservatism

The November 1996 election and a number of other recent events have offered an opportunity for reassessment among conservatives. At issue is not only the meaning of the election results themselves but the present and future character of a movement which only two years ago seemed to some to be bringing about a "revolution" in American political life.

Comes the Millennium

In New York City, the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center is already booked solid for the night of December 31, 1999.

The National Prospect

To commemorate Commentary's fiftieth anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American intellectuals:

Capitalism for Humans

Democrats are made, not born; and so are democratic capitalists.

The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind

This past winter, Michael Lind, erstwhile research assistant to William F. Buckley, Jr., quondam contributor to COMMENTARY, the Public Interest, and National Review, former executive editor of the National Interest, and now a senior editor at the New Republic, took to the pages of Dissent to justify his defection from the ranks of the “corrupt” conservative intellectuals, whom he pilloried as court theologians to a movement suffering from brain-death.

Are Human Rights Still Universal?

Five years after the Revolution of 1989, the idea that certain basic and inalienable human rights constitute the moral and political patrimony of all human beings—a claim presumably vindicated by the Communist crack-up and by the democratic transitions in East Central Europe, Latin America, and parts of East Asia—is once again under attack.

Politically-Correct Baseball

Innocent of the game's history, sociology, or metaphysics, I learned my baseball in the late 1950's the old-fashioned way: sitting beside my grandfather Weigel in the lower deck of Baltimore's cavernous old Memorial Stadium, in the days when the Orioles seemed to have taken out a 99-year lease on sixth place in the American League.

In Europe's Name, by Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash is best known to American readers as the British journalist whose front-line reports on the personalities and events that gave birth to the Revolution of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe were the finest materials on the subject available in English.

Creeping Talbottism

When it took office last year, the Clinton administration's conception of America's responsibilities in the world seemed to be an extension of the 1992 campaign's most memorable slogan—the bon mot attributed to Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville: “It's the economy, stupid.”

The Great Polish Experiment

Contrary to some of the more exuberant expectations bubbling in the wake of the Revolution of 1989, history has been going full blast in Central and Eastern Europe ever since the breaching of the Berlin Wall marked the demise of Stalin's external empire and opened the death watch for Marxism-Leninism in Europe.

Shultz, Reagan, and the Revisionists

The surprising election of a Democratic President in 1992, after a campaign that stressed the “stagnation, drift, and gridlock” of the Reagan-Bush years, has, among many other things, created the political and psychological space within which the liberal opinion establishment can fully indulge its craving to do some serious revisionism on the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980's.

The Great Melody, by Conor Cruise O'Brien

Samuel Johnson, one of the 18th century's most discerning spirits and a man hardly given to hyperbolic praise, once said of his Irish contemporary, the parliamentarian Edmund Burke:

Their Lustration-And Ours

When Hitler's Germany was defeated in 1945, there was little doubt in anyone's mind that if a democratic regime were to be established in that country (or at least the part of it under Western control), a period of “denazification” would be necessary.

The New Anti-Catholicism

Over the past several years, evidence has been mounting that new forms of an old bigotry, anti-Catholicism, are befouling American public life. Consider these incidents, listed in chronological order:

On the Road to Isolationism?

With the death of Communism and the waning of the cold war, a three-sided strategic and moral debate over the future course of U.S. foreign policy has emerged.