Dear Intelligent American,
Cathedrals are in the news. In France, Notre-Dame de Paris grabbed headlines last week as it commenced shedding its scaffolding, exposing its rebuild at the heights where a hunchback once practiced: The grand church’s spire, which so famously fell in flames during the 2019 fire, has been rebuilt. It is a heartening moment.
The Olympics will come to Paris this summer, but the cathedral’s completed rehabilitation will miss the festivities; it’s not until December that the massive Notre-Dame project will be completed. We shall wait patiently.
Closer to home, in the Big Apple, another famous cathedral—Saint Patrick’s—too found itself in the news. This proved a disheartening moment.
The funeral of a transgender atheist prostitute was, shall we say, “celebrated” there last week in an eruption of sexualized crudity and sacrilege, of drag camp and fishnet stockings, the officiant (once the head of a major religious order) himself a participant in the double-entendre madness. Two days afterward, a “Mass of Reparation” was held to purify the sacred place, whose stewards seem to take that very sacredness lightly. How an obvious blasphemous outcome could not have been envisioned is a head-scratcher. As for the faithful, they were angered and shocked. As for their shepherd, he was not to be heard from for days after the insanity’s immediate aftermath.
Sigh.
Sermon: Civil society requires not only tolerance, but respect of other faiths, and that coin’s flip side: disdaining disrespect for other faiths, or any faith. And: The right of free expression of religion doesn’t mean your free expression during the established and formal rites, even if the presiding cleric urges you to fly your freak flag. Also: As evidenced by last year’s display from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, there is nothing courageous—or seemingly uncommon—about dunking on Catholicism, or profaning one of its services. It bears repeating, that if you want to show your moxie, try dissing the Koran, or bringing the shtick to a mosque, whydoncha? But . . . doncha.
Let this opening close on a happier note. Consider a movie recommendation about another cathedral, the wonderful 1944 British flick, A Canterbury Tale. Do not, fellow pilgrim, let too much time pass without seeing this testament to localism.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road . . . Or, If You Prefer, These Enumerated Offerings
1. At First Things, Jeremy Beer tells of a great missionary, trailblazer, and should-be saint. From the piece:
To make the Spaniards’ use of this road feasible, Garcés first needed to win the friendship of the powerful Hopis, as he had done so far with every people with whom he had come into contact, not infrequently as the first European they had ever seen. But the Hopis rejected his overtures, refusing him food, shelter, and conversation. Garcés had spent two tense nights among them when, as the sun began to rise on the morning of July 4, flutes began to whistle, drums began to beat, warriors began to dance. Garcés was uneasy but not defeated. Summoning his resolve, he remained where he was and waited. Finally, seeing that he was indisposed to leave, four warriors approached him. “Why have you come here?” they asked. “Don’t stay. Go back to your own land.” Through signs, Spanish, and scraps of indigenous languages, Garcés communicated as best he could where he had come from, all the peoples he had seen, and how welcoming and open all had been. He told his audience, now growing large, that he cherished the Hopis, and for that reason had come to tell them about God and his crucifixion in the form of his son, the God-Man Jesus Christ.
An old man scowled. “No, no,” he thundered, his face displaying contempt for all the priest had said. It was the first time the friar’s narrative had ever been so decisively and disdainfully rejected. Perhaps the Hopis had not understood him. Or perhaps, he reflected, success would require a more holy messenger. In any case, it was obvious that if he valued his life, it was time to go. The Hopis’ evangelization would have to wait for another day. So too would Garcés’s martyrdom.
For their labors, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and their conspirators have received, at least until recent years, the pious reverence of succeeding generations. The primary monument to Francisco Garcés consists of a statue in a grimy Bakersfield traffic circle. Few people outside the specialized field of borderlands studies have heard of him. Yet Garcés’s multiple months-long treks into the unknown and dangerous wilderness make him one of the greatest pathfinders in American history. Scholars continue to unpack the anthropological and ethnological data Garcés gathered on his travels. His explorations facilitated the settling of California. If not for the friar’s exploits, San Francisco and Los Angeles might not have been established for many years, and a Spanish society might have failed to take root before the onslaught of the American Gold Rush, depriving California of a major component of its religious and cultural heritage.
2. More Walking, Pilgrim: At Catholic World Report, James Jeffrey this time takes the less-beaten path, following in the footsteps of the Man from Assisi. From the article:
That said, there is no genuine substance to the idea of a pilgrimage “standoff” between the two Ways—both pilgrimages are remarkable experiences taken in their entireties, each of which is worth doing. But in interrogating the differences between the two, the pilgrim is brought to a better and deeper understanding about his or her role in life, and about what both pilgrimages aim to reveal: the Tao, also known as the Way, amid the thickets and thorns of our contemporary world.
The Camino de Santiago is far more popular than the Via di Francesco: the former attracts around 300,000 pilgrims a year, while the latter is down around the tens of thousands. But as one of our Assisi pilgrims noted, the fact of the matter is that the Camino de Santiago is far less historically assured in comparison. Everything about the Way of Saint James is likely based on legend, with most scholars disputing that the apostle ever went to Spain. Whereas the Via di Francesco is unequivocally rooted in fact and concrete connections to Saint Francis and the region of Umbria that he called home and through which the route traverses.
It is also worth considering how, of the two saints, Saint Francis arguably speaks to our age more acutely. He was born at a time in the 13th century when “money was becoming more than simply a social convention, a medium of economic exchange,” Donald Spoto writes in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi. “People were beginning to pursue money as a primary goal, and the amount of money one acquired determined one’s status in the community.”
3. At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson delves into a troubling situation—that Americans have stopped hanging out. From the essay:
Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust. . . .
And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.
But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”
4. At Catholic Education Research Center, John Cuddeback proposes two steps by which one can discover his “contemplative identity.” From the piece:
Two common, dominant forces today are working against our contemplative identity. First, there is busyness and noise in our day, and second there is the implicit if not explicit primacy of ‘practicality’—experienced as ‘what’s the practical value of doing that?’ I want to be direct: I think many of us have been deeply if unconsciously formed by both forces. We find it difficult to make space for the contemplative and to justify doing so. Indeed, our contemplative identity is so underdeveloped we’re not sure what it is.
So what then can I do? Here are two significant steps we can take every day: 1. Take a walk, and just look, notice, and reflect. Don’t listen to a podcast; don’t go over in your mind ‘next steps’ in your day or how to address this or that problem. Just look, notice, and reflect. If the third—reflecting—doesn’t come easily, then start with the first two. Look and notice: birds, trees, people, sky, sun, architecture…maybe even angels. Truly, this is not some tool to help you relax. Nor is it a tool to make you more productive!—as though it needed that justification! This is a potent means to discover your humanity.
Reflective prayer. Let me again be direct: I do not purport to give the principles of prayer. But this much I say with confidence: aside from the all-important prayer of petition—of asking for things we need, there is a form of prayer that seeks most of all to see, to enter into the reality of who God is, and what he has done and is doing. It seeks to grow in knowledge, because we love; to grow in knowledge, as way a serving him, and a way of being with him. We don’t do this because it’s ‘practical,’ any more than we seek to know a human friend because it’s ‘practical.’ This need not take long each day. But it is life-giving; indeed it is, in a sense, life itself.
5. At Law & Liberty, Nadya Williams consoles: There is, after all, some love in higher ed for the humanities. From the piece:
The year 2023 was not a good one for the humanities and the liberal arts. A number of public universities, such as West Virginia University, continued the decade-old trend of slashing the humanities disciplines in order to meet budget shortfalls. Something must go, after all, if a university is facing enrollment declines (and obviously it’s not going to be administrators’ salaries). Besides, the number of students majoring in the humanities has not been gently declining—it’s been a merciless freefall for almost two decades now. Factor in curricular overhauls reducing core humanities requirements, and the prophets of doom can fulfill their prophecies quite nicely.
Jeremiads on the above trends abound, and so do recommendations for solutions. It may be more productive, though, to consider an alternate future that is possible, based on two examples of institutions where the humanities have been flourishing in Higher Ed’s apocalyptic age: the conservative Christian colleges Hillsdale and Grove City. Both have a reputation as bastions of conservative politics. A closer look reveals that both share a more interesting commonality, in this age when the humanities in secular institutions are floundering, stripped of all semblance of traditional virtue.
The remarkably high numbers of students majoring in the humanities and the liberal arts at Hillsdale College and Grove City College, by contrast, offer an idea that deserves our attention. The four most popular majors at Hillsdale are: Economics (12%), History (12%), English (9%), and Political Science (7%). And while Grove City College emphasizes its engineering and pre-med programs as well, Literature is still its third most popular major (5% of graduates). Both colleges, furthermore, continue to emphasize the value of the humanities in their general education curriculum, and the size of their tenure-track and tenured humanities faculty body reflects this value.
6. At Tablet Magazine, Professor Shai Davidai and wife Yardenne Greenspan, a leftist Jewish couple, learn that speaking out at Columbia University against Hamas barbarity exposes the innate antisemitism of alleged friends and colleagues. From the piece:
As leftist, liberal Zionists, we have always made a clear distinction between the people of Palestine and the inhumane terror organizations that falsely purport to speak in their name. Our support for a two-state solution has never wavered, and to this day we remain staunchly opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, refrain from buying products manufactured beyond the 1967 armistice line, and protest any governmental policy that we see as oppressive or unjust. Surely, we thought, our seemingly liberal friends would see that we, too, deserve to be heard.
This is what we got wrong. We failed to realize that for many in our “progressive” circle, being a liberal Israeli just wasn’t good enough. If we had kept quiet, they might have been willing to accept us as equals. If we apologized for Israel’s existence, they might have even given us some extra points. But exposing Hamas’ atrocities and the support it was gaining among young Americans? Naming the kidnapped children and begging the world to help bring them home? Giving voice to the Israeli victims of mass rape by Hamas terrorists? For our friends, our refusal to apologize for Israel’s existence simply deemed us intolerable. Their minds were already made up. They wouldn’t even let us plead our case.
It took us a while to understand it, but once we did everything started making sense: Our friends did not have a problem with our politics, they had a problem with our identity. Our friends were willing to overlook the fact that we were Jewish Israelis, but only so long as we shut up about it. For many in our “enlightened” circle, our ethnic and national identity was an unfortunate accident, something to apologize for rather than take pride in. We failed to realize that for many, our people’s continued existence was not a high priority.
7. At Comment Magazine, Bill Gardner finds his battle with cancer deepens his faith. From the essay:
Cancer humbled me, breaking the foci of my identity. Nietzschean struggle won’t cure cancer. Yes, the body is linked closely to the mind. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that your attitudes can affect tumour growth. (Your attitudes matter, however, for how you will live, given you have cancer.) My status in the hospital changed. At work, I wore a badge on a lanyard, a talisman with my degrees and the title “Professor,” a meritocratic coat of arms and a reminder that I am here for science. It’s the others who are here because their bodies are growing masses that may kill them. After the diagnosis, however, I was no longer “Dr. Gardner”; I was “Mr.” like any other patient. The diagnosis had converted me from an agent to a patient. (“Patient” derives from a Latin word that means “to suffer or endure.”) Cancer also limited my ability to do science. I’m in a field where projects take years. Cancer laughed: “Do you even have one year?”
What can patients hope for; what can power us out of despair? Cancer patients kill themselves at many times the rate of matched peers. I have lost a close friend to suicide following a cancer diagnosis, and I recently learned of a school friend who jumped from his building.
But in any situation, there are opportunities to serve. When word spread that I had late-stage cancer, many friends asked for Zoom calls. (These were the early days of Covid.) At first, these meetings were uncomfortable; I am an introvert and don’t want things to be about me. Yet I saw that many virtual visitors suffered because they didn’t want to lose me, and cancer frightened them. I began working on being a “good listener” who focused his attention on the other.
8. At Public Discourse, Lee Trepanier explains why liberalism needs piety. From the beginning of the essay:
Liberalism has faced recent criticism from the postliberal Right, with calls for its outright repudiation. The basis of these calls is that liberalism undermines community, religion, and morality. Other conservatives, however, are more hopeful of reinventing liberalism in a way that aligns with natural law in promoting values like marriage and family formation rather than autonomy and individualism. Then there are those who look to patriotism, personalism, and civil dialogue as antidotes to liberalism’s woes. The Right’s difficult relationship with liberalism is a choice between those who see the two as unending ideological antagonists and those who are more hopeful that liberalism and conservatism can engage in “a conversation among friends seeking truth in community.”
Conservative commentary about liberalism has mainly focused on its relationship to Christianity. What has been missing in this conversation is what classical thinkers like Aristotle have to offer. While both liberals and conservatives have explored his ethical theory, account of friendship and marriage, and analysis of faction, there has been little discussion of Aristotle’s view of piety and how it could enrich liberal politics. Mary P. Nichols, professor emerita of political science at Baylor University, fills in this gap with her book, Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the “Nicomachean Ethics.”
Beginning with Aristotle’s famous statement in his Politics—“Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god”—Nichols argues that Aristotle believes human flourishing occupies a middle ground between these two extremes. People need one another to flourish. By rising above our bestial natures, that is, learning how to live with others, we discover what is most akin to the divine in ourselves. But this also requires us to accept our limitations. We are not, and cannot become, gods. “A good human life, which reflects both the virtues and the limitations of the human,” writes Nichols, “would therefore neither deny the human connection to the divine nor try to eliminate the distance between the two.”
9. At Plough Magazine, Peter Kauffman tells of the importance of the table, where all gather to break bread and to be a family. From the essay:
The older boys have packed their lunch for the day of work. I sit at the table, between my next older brother and my next younger sister. There is cereal, buttered toast, and eggs most mornings, maybe two pieces of bacon or sausage for everyone. Everybody communicates in monosyllabic grunts. My older brother yawns, stretching to bump me on the head with his forearm. He does this every morning on purpose. After breakfast, there are family devotions (the boys eyeing the clock), and then we part ways for the day’s work.
We ate two meals a day together: breakfast and supper. I always had the same spot on the bench. We laughed often, teased about each other’s eating habits, and had long-standing family jokes that weren’t funny. We did not miss supper without a legitimate excuse. Looking back, I sense a security at that table that I never questioned. I belonged there, and when I was there, I was in the right spot. I might dream of living in a wilderness cabin or working as a cowboy or a traveling writer in the impossibly distant future, but at the time, I belonged at that table each morning and each evening.
That era of my life is over. I grew older, married, and now have my own household. But the memory of that belonging has gone with me, and now I wish to be gathered into a people so I might belong, with that same certainty, to a particular place in the world. Growing up, I liked to stay aloof from the people I spent my life with, because it allowed me to be a little proud and retain the image of individual. But all the while I was part of them whether I liked it or not; they were woven into my history and memory. Today, I see how my family and church, with their foibles and strengths, have shaped me and I am grateful to them. I am now learning what it means to belong, and submitting myself to the work of living it out has led me to cherish both the idea and the reality of it.
10. At The American Conservative, Carmel Richardson takes a shot at explaining America’s “vaccine hesitancy.” From the piece:
There’s another consideration here too, which is the moving target of “fully vaccinated.” Children today are required to take a minimum of 76 doses of 18 vaccines by the age of 18 years. That is a lot of shots for any parent, even those who are still friendly to the public health regime. Is the decline in childhood vaccination rates caused exclusively by vaccine hesitancy, or is it that the bar has gotten too high for the average parent to find it worth reaching? This certainly makes optional shots like the RSV vaccine less appealing than ever.
If “bad information” is the problem, the solution, for those with a monopoly on Good Information, is more aggressive control of language. This has been tried since 2020, and has proven unhelpful in converting vaccine skeptics into vaccine lovers, but nevertheless the medical community persists. The next step for public health officials, according to POLITICO and the health experts it cites, should be “a way of monitoring social media to rapidly identify newly emerging misinformation.” In other words, the experts’ latest narrative simply needs to be propagated faster, smarter, better, and maybe this time Americans will fall in line. Heaven forbid health, or science, get in the way.
11. At The Free Press, Tamara Pietzke and Jamie Reed, whistleblowers, tell how the act puts one in the crosshairs of transgender ideologues. From the interview:
Jamie: After my story was published, I was inundated with contacts from the LGBT community—individuals who reached out and shared their stories of being silenced at work for asking basic evidence-based questions—just as Tamara described in her story. We also talked about how the big LGBT organizations have been some of the loudest voices trying to shut down any questioning of youth transition.
We started meeting and decided to create a coalition to bring back the idea of free speech in the LGBT community.
Now we have a team of 25 dedicated to making the LGBT Courage Coalition happen, starting with a Substack. We are trying to model what difficult conversations look like. We don’t agree on everything, but we do agree that there is a serious need for debate around the effectiveness and the continuing use of medical procedures for kids who are experiencing gender issues.
We also decided that a good place for our advocacy would be in supporting other whistleblowers, people like Tamara.
12. At Providence, Alina Clough captures the disaster rendered by Red China’s “One Child” policy. From the analysis:
The Party’s experiment in reigning in fertility proved more difficult than simply issuing a proclamation, ultimately requiring a wide array of carrots and sticks to achieve compliance across the Chinese population. Efforts were primarily concentrated in urban areas, both because overpopulation there was more problematic and because families in more rural communities were less likely to comply with the mandate. In addition to increasing access to various forms of contraception, the CCP would force abortions and sterilizations on women who already had a child. If women refused, government officials could bulldoze their homes or arrest their family members to pressure them into compliance.
Over time, though, the policy’s effect on the population’s fear of the government and perception of babies meant that abortion and infanticide became a way of life. China’s infanticide epidemic was particularly brutal on female children. Since male children were both socially and economically more valuable, especially in rural areas where they were needed to both work and inherit family farms, it was common for parents to kill or abandon female babies in favor of trying for sons.
It’s become clear that the One Child Policy has backfired in more ways than one. The rapid decrease in population means that China’s population pyramid is “top heavy,” with older generations, especially the 45 to 65-year-old brackets, outnumbering younger ones. As older generations begin exiting the workforce, it’s unclear whether younger generations will be large enough to care for them, both in terms of the number of healthcare workers and the direct care parents typically rely on from children, but also the economy and tax pool more broadly.
Lucky 13. At the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Ryan Hansen reports on a Hawkeye State dance marathon that raised well over a million bucks for a kids’ hospital. From the beginning of the piece:
The money flowed at the University of Iowa's Memorial Union last week, all for a good cause.
The school's 30th Dance Marathon’s “Big Event” Feb. 2-3 raised nearly $1.5 million for the Stead Family Children’s Hospital, its largest total in four years and nearly 25 percent more than 2023.
The final tally was $1,454,929.30, revealed in traditional form with neon green highlighter near the end of the 24-hour event. The large increase in funding bucked a post-COVID trend that saw totals shrink.
Sushma Santhana, the executive director of Dance Marathon 30, said every participant's involvement and enthusiasm were impressive, aided by high energy.
Bonus. At National Review, Charlie Cooke dissects the story of a scam, and thinks the scammed author may be scamming the reader. From the beginning of the piece:
At the Cut, a freelance financial-advice columnist named Charlotte Cowles weaves a story of credulousness and incompetence that is so absurd as to be nigh-on impossible to believe. Cowles’s piece is titled, The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam, and, somehow, its contents are more remarkable than that headline suggests. Across more than 5,000 self-indulgent words, Cowles tells the tale of a single day last October, on which she fell for one of the most far-fetched and obvious con-jobs I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. The saga takes a while to unfold, but the bottom line of the thing is that Cowles received an unsolicited phone call from someone purporting to be from Amazon, and ended up handing 50 grand in cash to a stranger in a white Mercedes. If you’ve ever spent any time wondering whether our elite class might be a touch misnamed, then this is the essay for you.
I have read Cowles’s story four times now, and I must confess that I am still struggling to believe that it is real. I offer that judgment in spite of, rather than because of, my low regard for most journalists—who, in the twelve years since I moved to the United States, I have found almost uniquely gullible as a class. If, indeed, the events of last Halloween went down as Cowles insists that they did, then she ought to be congratulated for her achievement: She has, in a single day, demonstrated exactly why Americans have such a low regard for the press. And if the events didn’t go down like that? Then I’d like to know what did. Given the professional humiliation to which Cowles has subjected herself with her confession, it’s hard to imagine that she has made up the whole story. Nevertheless, there are elements of her tale that have given me pause, and, in the interest of laying down a marker, I thought I’d flag them here for posterity.
Bonus Bonus. Fascinating: At City Journal, Nicholas Wade explains new technology that unlocks antiquity. From the beginning of the piece:
A computer scientist has labored for 21 years to read carbonized ancient scrolls that are too brittle to open. His efforts stand at last on the brink of unlocking a vast new vista into the world of ancient Greece and Rome.
Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, has developed methods for scanning scrolls with computer tomography, unwrapping them virtually with computer software, and visualizing the ink with artificial intelligence. Building on his methods, contestants recently vied for a $700,000 prize to generate readable sections of a scroll from Herculaneum, the Roman town buried in hot volcanic mud from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
The last 15 columns—about 5 percent—of the unwrapped scroll can now be read and are being translated by a team of classical scholars. Their work is hard, as many words are missing and many letters are too faint to be read. “I have a translation but I’m not happy with it,” says a member of the team, Richard Janko of the University of Michigan. The scholars recently spent a session debating whether a letter in the ancient Greek manuscript was an omicron or a pi.
The scholars believe that the manuscript is a work of Philodemus, a tutor of the great Roman poet Virgil and the house philosopher at the villa in Herculaneum where the scrolls were found. They can’t be sure because the author and title, usually written at the outer end of the scroll where they are working, have not been provided to them. Some suspect that this information is being withheld to test the validity of their attribution. Seales says this isn’t the case; his group is still looking for the author and title lines.
For the Good of the Order
Uno. Jon Hannah, the legendary leader of the Center for Civil Society, has big news. There are a few spots left in the 2024 AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship cohort. “This nine-month program,” writes JH, “includes monthly reading group meetings, full access to our master classes, an assigned AmPhil consultant as a mentor, and a ticket to our Givers, Doers, & Thinkers conference.” Friend, if you happen to know a fundraiser who is dedicated to the profession and looking for an opportunity to improve as a nonprofit professional, alert them to the Fellowship opportunity. It’s an exceptional way to accelerate a fundraising career by learning alongside peers, graced and guided by AmPhil’s expertise.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Patrice Onwuka looks at the nearly $17 billion pumped into “racial reckoning” philanthropy, and wonders just what it accomplished. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the man never shower before church?
A: He wanted to sit in his own pew.
A Dios
Brother Snow visited after a two-year absence, all wet and heavy, claiming a few branches as casualties—there will be fewer lilacs this spring. But for a few hours, he painted a beautiful landscape. And later, the neighborhood kids grabbed their sleds, took to the hill, and had themselves some fun, while consternated George (mutt, loveable) barked at this unusual display outside the living-room window. He may have been jealous. Yours Truly was.
May His Ever-Available Graces Be Sought and Embraced,
Jack Fowler, who between shovels-ful checks out communications sent to jfowler@centerforcivilsociety.org.
