There are three words critical to understanding Roger Kimball’s “Restoring American Culture” essay in the Imprimis, February 2025 issue: common sense, culture, and civilization. Unfortunately, Kimball never defined them. It was a provocative essay – one that makes you think. The piece was adapted from his talk last January at Hillsdale College, the people who …
There’s a lot of smart people in the world. One of them is Kevin D. Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation. He recently appeared in IMPRIMIS, the Hillsdale College publication with an essay “Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order.” I read his essay twice, and was reminded of a blog I wrote in 2012 entitled, …
This site is less a blog than a thinking space. Here I write as Jim Nowakowski — observer, reader, citizen, and lifelong questioner. These pages hold my personal reflections on literature, culture, politics, history, language, and the uneasy intersections between them. Some pieces are analytical, some speculative, some simply forms of intellectual wandering. Some extremely …
Should you listen to an academic or …? An article by John Fonte published in the June/July 2024 issue of IMPRIMIS, coming out of Hillsdale College, was called “National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, and Americanism.” Fonte is a smart guy – degrees in history and a writer for many publications. And while he parses the conservative …
I introduced myself to our Pastor via e-mail. I like to do this to establish a relationship. It was about his homily. I wrote: “Albert Camus once wrote, “One moment of weakness, and everything is lost, theory and practice.” This is one of the guiding principles of my life. Very difficult to be strong all …
Artis-Naples was visited by ghosts from the Swing Era past on Friday night, December 8, 2023. When Dave Bennett took the stage with his quartet comprised of himself (Clarinet, Guitar, Piano and Vocals), Jeff Kressler on Piano, Ed Fedewa playing the Bass and Pete Siers on Drums, the audience was transported into an era long …
The thing about a tradition is that if you stop doing what the tradition stands for, you lose the meaning of the tradition itself. A tradition — the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation — disappears and becomes lost, and everything around that tradition leaves human consciousness. Fortunately, the tradition of honoring …
Republicans haven’t figured out who or what they are fighting, and more important, how to fight who they are fighting. First, what is it that they are fighting? Vince Everett Ellison put it distinctly in Crime, Inc., “…foreign Communist/Marxist governments, through patience and cunning, systematically took over the Democratic Party, thereby infiltrating the federal government …
Secret shopping is an interesting concept. You hire people to go “undercover” and gather research. Sometimes it’s about pricing. Sometimes it’s how you are treated by a competitor. There was an entire TV series (Undercover Boss) that was spawned by the concept. I’ve never seen the series, but I have done my share of Secret …
I was stunned at the homily one weekend a few years ago going over Luke 17: 11-19, the story about the ten lepers and the one who came back to thank Jesus for cleansing them. The priest (whose cell phone inevitably goes off during any homily he gives) used the story to bring in a …
