They were not like the penniless rabble of antiquity who traded their votes to unscrupulous demagogues

Quote of the Day for Tuesday, June 7th, 2011: Walter Russell Mead on The Death of the American Dream: A nation of family farms is a nation of family firms; suburban America was a land of employees.  America’s shift from a nation of entrepreneurs to a nation working for corporations and government was a profound change in national life that even today is not well or fully understood. The ideal of the independent small farmer was at the heart of early American democratic ideology.  Critics of democracy had always asserted in the past that a mass ...

Archbishop Chaput Fingers JFK

Related to the juxtaposed references to articles on civic and religious engagement in Monday’s post, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered an address at Houston Baptist University on Monday entitled The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life, which is particularly interesting for the way he takes John F. Kennedy to task for his famous speech in Houston 50 years ago, in which Kennedy tried to reassure his audience of Protestant ministers that his Catholicism would not play a meaningful role in his public performance of duty, should he b...

Where Is This Heading?

I came across a couple of interesting studies today – whether there is any kind of correlation, I’ll let the reader decide. In a poll done by the Knights of Columbus, the religious attitudes of the so-called Millennial generation are compared to the older surviving generations, breaking out the Catholics among the generations as well. This is a bit of a fluffy presentation – looking more like a PowerPoint deck than a real study – but the results are intriguing, in a morose way. I must say that I question some of the analysis, as presented on the KoC site...