A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
At the Bradley Prizes ceremonies in Washington last week, many noteworthy things were said and done and observed. One was the speech by Sebastien Lai, son of Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong freedom champion who has now spent over 1,600 days imprisoned. Jimmy was an honorary recipient. If you don’t know about him, you should. You can start here.
Another honoree, James Piereson, gave a frank talk about the state of the American university and the hope some have for the from-within reforming of elite institutions. Jim’s unvarnished remarks (be assured Civil Thoughts will link to them when published) poured cold water on that wishful thinking, made despite the ideology-steeped, heck-bent character of most major universities.
It is good to hear such truth spoken in large venues—it is a small-but-inspiring tonic for the soul that is too accustomed to hearing instead pravda.
A few weeks back, Jim and Jeremy Beer had a terrific conversation about the state of conservative philanthropy. Catch it here.
Jeremy’s “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast series is focusing on America 250 (we are little more than a month now from America 249), and other sources too are trying to bring attention to our hoopla-deserving Semiquincentennial. You should therefore know that next week, in thousands of theaters, a new made-by-good-guys movie will be released, The American Miracle: Our Nation Is No Accident. Do think about catching it.
If You’ve Been Hankering for 14 Smart Articles, You’ve Come to the Right Place
1. At National Review, Jack Butler explains why Harvard needed the kind of commencement speech it once got, from the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. From the piece:
When Solzhenitsyn, plainly dressed and through a translator, addressed Harvard’s graduating class, students would have had no reason to expect from such a man the banal, vaguely adulatory clichés that so frequently ruin the modern collegiate commencement address. Nor, however, could they have anticipated what Solzhenitsyn would tell them. The first hint was his admission that his speech would include “a measure of bitter truth,” though offered “as a friend, not as an adversary.”
And bitter truths they were. As balance of power in the Cold War seemed to shift toward Soviet Russia and its allies, Solzhenitsyn criticized the then-regnant American and Western attitude of conciliation toward communism. He criticized “the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces.” He castigated the “American intelligentsia” for having “lost its nerve” during the Vietnam War, as a result of which “the danger has come much closer to the United States.” And he excoriated a West obsessed with ensuring that “the world situation must stay as it is at any cost; there must be no changes”—that is, to a status quo that accommodated the evils of communism, evils he knew firsthand.
It does not lessen the power of Solzhenitsyn’s oratory that just two years later, America would elect as president Ronald Reagan, a man who defied these sentiments; and that a little over a decade later, the Soviet Union would itself dissolve. His remarks were far more than a political criticism of the contemporary West. They were a profound moral critique. The West’s dire political situation was downstream of a wider social sickness.
2. At Front Porch Republic, Frank Filocomo reports on a reading group that is disrupting the isolation epidemic. From the piece:
Though admittedly dubious at first (how, I thought, could reading, a decisively solitary activity, bring about social connection?), I was delightfully surprised by what I found: an enthusiastic bunch of young people, books in hand, ready to meet new friends.
The format is simple: We start with 30 minutes of independent reading time, followed by an increment of 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 conversation about what we’re reading, then another silent reading session, ending with group discussion. Great facilitators and prompts around the room—which, in this case, was an unassuming brewery with ample seating and verdant plant displays—helped keep conversation on track. The addition of some ambient music—which tenor guitar player John Lawlor once described as “musical wallpaper”—was a nice touch, too.
Though some folks were understandably timid at first, a wave of loquacity hit the room during our conversation time; everyone wanted to discuss what they had been reading. I even saw some people exchanging phone numbers and inquiring about the next event.
A Quick Stop for a Hurrah!
Herewith some terrific news from The Heritage Foundation, which has just announced the recipients of its annual “Innovation Prizes,” which recognize and provide substantive financial awards (over $1 million!) to results-oriented nonprofits. The prizes' 2025 winners are the American College of Pediatricians, American Reformer, the Ben Franklin Fellowship, Do No Harm, Families Empowered, LifeWise Academy, Napa Legal Institute, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, State Armor, Them Before Us, and Wired Human. If you donate to these wonderful organizations, consider your charity wisely direct.
Keep Applauding as We Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Program
3. At the Institute for Family Studies, John Mancini explains how to make marriage great again. From the report:
Marriage proponents may respond with—what I call—the “security argument.” There are variations of the security argument. But here’s the gist: The security argument responds to the above by asking: If two people fully intend to spend the rest of their lives together, then why not get married? By staying unmarried, so the argument goes, cohabitants leave open that they might eventually break up—contrary to how cohabitants claim to view their relationship. By getting married, however, cohabitants eliminate this possibility. In marriage and only in marriage, two people formally establish their intentions to love and cherish each other until death parts them. There is, of course, the possibility of divorce. But divorcing from one’s beloved is harder than breaking up with her. So, at the very least, the security argument argues that marriage adds an extra level of security to cohabiting relationships; it becomes harder to end things with one’s beloved by marrying her. At most, the security argument argues that marriage ensures that cohabitants don’t live in a contradiction. If two people truly intend to spend the rest of their lives together, they will make this clear by diminishing the possibility that they’ll split, i.e., by getting married.
On the whole, I don’t find the security argument very persuasive. Cohabitants may deem getting married unnecessary. They may think that their love will hold them together and that they don’t need marriage’s added security. And while data suggests not only that the vast majority of unmarried couples will fail in this quest but also that their relationships will harm the men, women, and children involved, perhaps there’s no reason for a couple to think they wouldn’t be part of the lucky few who beat those odds. So long as those lucky few exist, cohabitants can reasonably hope that they’ll flourish in their relationship. Hence, I don’t think the security argument succeeds; marriage proponents should encourage marriage a different way.
4. At Modern Age, Dominic Green says civilization is the consequence of religion and empire and their inseparable relationship. From the essay:
Our world was made by empires and religions, not nation-states and constitutions. The liberal world order that the United States sponsored after 1945 is, like its domestic order, an empire in all but name. The United States was the first postcolonial society, so perhaps it should not surprise us that it became the first postmodern empire. America walks and quacks like an imperial duck, but it chooses not to take up the burden of the feathered helmet, the imperial signifier that had previously marked the species. The rest of the world is not taken in. We see you.
We also see the similarly postmodern way in which the United States is a Christian nation in both observance and the breach, especially when it believes it is not. Patriarch Kirill’s observations about anti-Christs and exorcists are typical of the snug alliance of religion and politics throughout imperial history. The breach is the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric that substituted the transnational legalism of human rights for the Christian imperative of saving souls. Both God and the United Nations presume universal dominion. Neither can enforce it without an army. All empires have proudly hung their banners on their palaces and called it eternity. The American non-empire happens to hang the Pride flag from its embassies and call it progress. As Eric Voegelin noted at extravagant length in his survey of politics as religion, the exceptionalism of Western imperium lies in its missionary discontinuities.
5. At Minding the Campus, Rebekah Wanic warns that colleges are undergoing a discipline deficit. From the piece:
Among the most prominent examples is the disregard for academic deadlines. Increasingly, students request extensions without justification or with excuses that would have previously prompted shame. The proliferation of disability and student wellness workers also supports them in these endless requests for extensions. No longer is poor time management seen as a personal failing, but rather as an outcropping of stress or a myriad of other victim-mindset-based excuses. Yes, the end of the semester is busy—that’s why you have had the full semester to work on your term paper. Leaving all your work to the last minute is a personal choice that should be punished, not rewarded with extensions.
This normalization of deadline flexibility erodes the development of discipline and time management skills, which are foundational to both academic and career success. Moreover, it fosters a sense of entitlement that clashes with the realities of most professional environments, where the consequences of failing to meet deadlines carry greater weight.
6. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno gives the lowdown as to how teachers today are thinking about education. From the article:
Even as personal job satisfaction inches up, many teachers remain pessimistic about K-12 education. The Pew Research Center poll found that 82% of public school teachers say K-12 education has worsened in the past five years. Only 20% expect improvements over the next five years, while the majority (53%) fear it will worsen. In short, public school teachers believe K-12 education is on the wrong track.
Teachers cite many reasons for this pessimism, including social and behavioral problems that make their job harder. When the Pew Research Center asked public school teachers about student challenges, three issues topped the list: poverty (53%), chronic absenteeism (49%), and children’s mental health struggles (48%). These issues cut across urban and rural lines and are acute in high schools: 61% of public high school teachers cite absenteeism as a major issue.
7. At First Things, Nicole Stelle Garnett sizes up the Supreme Court’s troubling ruling on religious education. From the beginning of the analysis:
On May 22, the Supreme Court let stand, by a divided vote and without opinion, a decision of the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocking what would have been the nation’s first religious charter school. The school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, is a joint project of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. It sought to participate in Oklahoma’s charter school program in order to deliver a high-quality virtual Catholic education across the large rural state, where many children lack access to brick-and-mortar Catholic schools. The Court’s decision has no precedential weight, and the question presented in the case—whether laws prohibiting religious charter schools violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause—will undoubtedly be relitigated in the months and years ahead.
Much ink has been spilled about the St. Isidore case, including by me. In 2023, the state’s charter school board entered into a contract with St. Isidore after concluding that provisions of Oklahoma law prohibiting charter schools from being religiously affiliated and requiring them to be secular violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. The board was right to do so. In a series of recent decisions, the Supreme Court has made clear that, when the government creates public programs that invite private organizations to advance public goals like education, the First Amendment requires it to extend the invitation to secular and religious organizations alike. Despite the overheated rhetoric suggesting that reversing the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision would remove the last brick in the proverbial wall separating church and state, the question before the Supreme Court involved a straightforward application of that nondiscrimination principle.
8. At City Journal, Stephen Eide reports on the troubling intersection of marijuana use and mental illness. From the piece:
Modern mental-health systems are community-based and thus shaped by community norms. Decades ago, clouds of pot smoke were not often encountered on city streets. Now that they’re ubiquitous, a seriously mentally ill individual may be inclined to wonder what’s so objectionable about an activity that normal Americans do daily, in public and even during working hours.
The issue is only partly whether pot causes mental illness. A large body of research studies, involving tens of thousands of people, has suggested, with impressive replicability, that heavy cannabis use increases the risk of developing mental illness. Legalization proponents reject this, contending that, while the rate of marijuana consumption has soared over recent decades, the rate of serious mental illness seems to have stayed flat.
But this debate has eclipsed interest in the effect of continued cannabis use on those already mentally ill. What can be done about that? For scores of clinicians and families of the mentally ill across the nation, it’s the more pressing question.
9. At The American Conservative, Peter Tonguette decries the decline of the well-dressed. From the article:
I could recite my secondhand sartorial preferences with such precocious authority that I managed to impress, or at least leave an impression upon, the tailor at a Jos. A. Bank store in downtown New Orleans, where my father ran a company and where I spent much of my youth. On one Saturday afternoon when my father was buying a suit—and I was undoubtedly reeling off the dos and don’ts of menswear—the tailor told me: “You’re a clothes horse like your father.”
I had never heard the term before, but I carried it with me throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. Apparently wanting to live up to the title, I never went through anything that resembled a period of slovenly dress. Now, in my very early 40s, I take it as a point of pride to dress as well as I can.
Yet being a clothes horse ain’t as easy as it used to be.
10. At Comment Magazine, Casey Spinks finds frugality is too short-changed. From the piece:
My objection to this trend is somewhat personal. In these popular jeremiads against thrift, I fear a tradition of Protestant prudence, one in which I was raised, is given short shrift. But some of those fusty Protestant mores were in fact meant as charity. For example, most of us know that elderly relative or hard-pressed friend who will never take money when it’s offered. Try as McCarraher or Hart might, they cannot explain such refusals only as cases of rugged individualism alongside its companion sin of pride. Such refusals might also be the only means of charity for those who cannot otherwise afford to give to others, thus passing on the gift to those who are even more in need than they are.
Or we risk ignoring simple principles of common wisdom that are now neglected by most. Until adulthood, I had no idea that others were not raised with the advice to pay off their full credit-card balance at the end of each month, as long as they can. This should be proverbial. It is easy to do in all but harsh circumstances (as there surely are among the impoverished). But few do it even in normal, “middle-class” circumstances: Recent data show 50 to 60 percent of middle-income households now have credit-card debt—the most among the tax brackets. So this wisdom is now a point of privilege, one I have only by virtue of being raised by boring Baptists, and one that many of the upper classes are all too happy to use for themselves while they preach against it in public. For the sake of the poor, this should not be so, and certainly not because various intellectuals have denigrated frugality.
11. At Public Discourse, Ivana Greco thinks parenting needs to be conceived as a skilled profession. From the relection:
Second, once we accept that parents at home are doing something difficult and mentally challenging, society might be more willing to support them. Unfortunately, we still think of taking care of kids and family as unskilled labor; something daycare workers and cleaning ladies are paid pitifully little to tackle. But how much the workplace pays someone to do a job is not the full measure of how valuable it is! Despite our emphasis on GDP and economic growth in determining which jobs are socially useful, the unpaid—yet skilled—work of the home remains a crucial part of society. If we recognize that fact, we might be more willing to hire homemaker parents who want to rejoin the paid workforce. Recognizing that parents at home have been doing something demanding and important means recognizing their “résumé gap” is not a gap at all, but rather time spent honing skills—such as project management, multitasking, and emotional intelligence—that translate to the paid workforce. Likewise, there might be more pressure on policymakers to support these important men and women, including through helping to ensure that they have generous social safety net benefits. We need not return to the nineteenth century’s cult of domesticity and its “glorification of motherhood,” as historian Christopher Lasch pointed out, to value the work of the home. As he wrote in his essay “The Sexual Division of Labor,” modern feminists often argue that equality for women can only be achieved when mothers work full-time just like men. Lasch disagrees, claiming instead that a “feminism worthy of the name . . . [i]nstead of acquiescing in the family’s subordination to the workplace would seek to remodel the workplace around the needs of the family.”
12. At Tablet Magazine, Itxu Díaz covers the foul attempts by Eurocrats to diminish Israel. From the beginning of the article:
The Eurovision Song Contest just wrapped up one of its most controversial editions, which revealed a stark disconnect between European audiences and their governments. For the third year in a row, Israel received more popular votes than those awarded by the national juries. While viewers this year voted overwhelmingly for Israeli singer Yuval Raphael, European bureaucrats went to comical lengths to exclude and efface the Israeli contestant, resulting in her second-place finish.
The now-familiar Eurovision vitriol toward Israel began even before the contest, when public broadcasters from six participating countries pushed to exclude Israel from the event, comparing it to Russia as an aggressor state. Then, after Raphael’s song, “New Day Will Rise,” received the most votes from audiences, the Spanish Broadcasting Authority (RTVE) demanded a reassessment of the voting system. Despite denying RTVE’s request, the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the event, excluded Raphael from the contest’s official video clip last week, even after she finished second.
I should’ve seen it coming.
For a while now, RTVE has been turning every artistic or sporting event into a chance to brainwash viewers with political talking points. Since May 2024, when Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez caved to pressure from his communist coalition partners and recognized the “Palestinian state,” the socialist government’s stance has been deeply anti-Israel, adopting measure after measure against Jerusalem. Just weeks ago, Sánchez, buckling again to his coalition allies in order to cling to power, canceled an arms contract with an Israeli company, sparking a fresh row.
Lucky 13. At Community Impact in The Woodlands, Julianna Washburn reports on a Texas nonprofit raising funds to battle autism. From the beginning of the article:
Thrive With Autism, a nonprofit helping children with autism, held its first fundraiser on April 24 to raise support the next expansion phase for the Thrive Center for Success, an autism-focused public charter school in Magnolia. . . .
More than 120 community members came together at Truluck's Ocean’s Finest Seafood for the “Serving Up Hope” fundraiser . . .
The school currently serves 152 students from kindergarten through seventh grade, combining applied behavioral analysis with academics, according to its website. The Thrive Center for Success opened in August 2022 and began operating out of its new building in Magnolia during the 2023-24 school year. . . .
“After walking the halls of Thrive, I saw firsthand what’s possible when we combine world-class therapies with the right academic setting,” event co-chair Melissa Young said in the news release. “We’re honored to rally behind a school that’s changing lives every day.”
Bonus. At Civitas Outlook, Ronald Dworkin encourages the reading of Augustine. From the article:
After he left the Manicheans, Augustine became a skeptic, with no strong allegiance to any belief system. I behaved similarly, thinking there was no truth, nor had there ever been any truth. However, Augustine then discovered philosophy, particularly Plato. Through philosophy, he transcended the material world and glimpsed the universal and eternal. Philosophy did not offer mere intellectual security. It was more objective and academic, disciplining the spirit in a new way; it expressed a love of truth, a righteous love, durable and ever faithful.
In my late twenties, while in graduate school, I, too, discovered Plato, thinking I had finally found truth to live by. Nestled deep in my armchair, I transcended the material world and travelled by my reason as far as the highest and remotest stars, into the heavenly realm of Ideas.
But Augustine soon realized that Plato is pretty thin gruel to live by. What does a life of pure reason promise? Isolation and solitude—a solitude without flowers or colors, without sounds, smells, or touch, without animals or people, a solitude without even a god, an airless solitude of some strange world existing before or beyond time. It is a world where nothing refreshes or relaxes; at most, a meager repast of urbane conversation in a low voice with another philosopher. No play, no scenery, no costume, no eros. I observed these same limitations in philosophy.
So Augustine came to the end of his journey and found God. He realized the serene calm he wanted could come from no other method than grace. In my case, I went to the end of my journey and found Augustine.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Therese Beigel explains why mail still matters. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Boaz Witbeck tells of a dramatic gift to the Boys and Girls Club. It’s a great story. Read it here.
Tre. On the new Givers, Doers, & Thinkers podcast, Jeremy Beer and James Piereson have a terrific discussion on the impact of conservative philanthropy. It’s up on YouTube, and you can watch it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: How do you describe a baguette in a cage?
A: Bread in captivity.
A Dios
A couple of Civil Thoughts ago attention was drawn to a New York Post op-ed by Dovie Eisner, disabled of body but not of mind, who railed against the prospects of New York adopting a mercy killing / suicide-by-doctor law. Subsequent to his piece being published, an oxygen tube somehow disconnected—who knows how long Dovie was deprived of it? He is now in a New York hospital fighting for his life, a precious thing. Do you believe in the power of prayer? If so, will you please pray that Dovie recovers, God’s will be done.
May We Be Befriended as Was Lazarus,
Jack Fowler, who types with calamine-lotioned fingers at jfowler@amphil.com.
