Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

Remember and Honor

 

Politically homeless

Irving Kristol once defined a neoconservative as "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Former mainstream liberal Democratic mayor of Madison, Dave Cieslewicz, seems to have suffered a mugging. In his recent column, "A Conservative By September?" he writes that he is going to study conservative thought, but "By this I most definitely do not mean anything having to do with Donald Trump, who is no conservative in any event. Trump is a blood and soil, white Christian nationalist populist. I want nothing to do with any of that or with the obnoxious “conservative” blatherers, like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson." He continues:

I realize that I’m in political no man’s land, no matter what I choose to call myself. I enthusiastically reject what Donald Trump represents. But I’m also repulsed by a liberalism that rejects Enlightenment values to pursue a rigid identity politics in which everyone is either a helpless victim or an undeserving winner based solely on their race or gender. What attracts me most about traditional conservatism is that it sees people as individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life.

Identity politics is now so engrained in the Democratic Party that I don’t see how it can reform itself. Meanwhile, I don’t know how the Republicans can recover from Trump, now that they’re addicted to his populist voters. If the pre-Trump party could ever reconstitute itself, I might give it a try, but I don’t see that happening.

What I question is whether I want to go on thinking of myself as a moderate, non-partisan Democrat or rather as a traditionally conservative (and classically liberal) independent.

I know. Nobody cares. But I do. ....

Reagan said that he didn't leave the Democratic party; it left him. These days, there are a whole lot of us, from both major parties, who feel the same way, politically homeless.

Dave Cieslewicz, "A Conservative By September?," Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos: A safe place for moderates in a polarized world, May 19, 2026.

War on the "pigs"

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. In a review of Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, attention is called to  approval of the Manson "family" murders by political radicals. The Mangione fans are hardly original:

.... Manson sought to discredit the entire proceedings, and was tutored in flamboyant disruptive tactics by Jerry Rubin, one of the “Yippie” (Youth International Party) activist prankster-protesters who’d caused mayhem by donning judges’ robes in court two years earlier, when he’d been charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

Rubin claimed to have fallen “in love with Manson” after seeing his “cherubic face and sparkling eyes on national TV”. He wasn’t the only Leftist who saw Manson and his co-defendants as fellow travelers in the revolution to come. Members of the terrorist Weather Underground group equally toasted the Family’s supposed war on “the pigs”, meaning the ruling establishment, on the basis that the victims were white and wealthy. .... (more)

Travis Elborough, "Why Charles Manson was even more crazed than you thought," The Telegraph, May 19, 2026.

"Other forces at work..."

Wise counsel from a work of fiction:

...Tolkien’s assessment of history isn’t just the musings of some dour and curmudgeonly professor. His views never amounted to despair or cynicism; as is his read on history, they are tethered and illumined by hope.

This is alluded to throughout The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation, while Frodo and Gandalf are in the Mines of Moria, Frodo laments,

“It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.” Notice how Gandalf’s answer isn’t merely a reprimand or a lecture on providence.

Gandalf: “Pity? It's pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

There are other forces at work, indeed. ....

In the epic of Tolkien’s literary masterpiece, he does in fantasy and fairy tale what few theologians and professors can do in lectures. In his characters, we see despair assuaged, courage enlivened, contempt tempered. Ultimately, Tolkien reminds us that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Precisely because this is what God does, we can trust that the best strategy for the church and for us individually in the Christian life is not to relent to our reactionary impulses but to “Let folly be our cloak!”

We might think hanging on to the ordinary means of grace is an act of despair, but it's not. We can’t fathom that in these plain practices, by faith, we are participating in the most powerful things in the world. Not in a methodological, technical, or pragmatic sense; the rituals of the church do not coax God as if he’s a feral animal. God’s mystical and mysterious work is beyond all of that. Rather, they are the very inbreaking of the New Creation in our lives.

You see, in a world where God has revealed himself, become incarnate, died for our sins, and risen for our justification, who promises to come again to judge the living and the dead, there is no room for cultural moods to dictate our life and ministry. .... (more)

Caleb Wait, "A Veil Before the Eyes of the Enemy: On Tolkien, Foolishness, and the Ordinary Means of Grace," Modern Reformation, May 19, 2026.

As Memorial Day approaches

Kevin DeYoung on "Why Christians Should Give Thanks for Memorial Day" begins ".... It is always tricky to know how the church should or shouldn’t celebrate patriotic holidays. Certainly, some churches blend church and state in such a way that the kingdom of God morphs into a doctrinally-thin, spiritually nebulous civil religion. But even with this danger, there are a number of good reasons why Christians should give thanks for Memorial Day." DeYoung continues with five points. Two of them:

1. Being a soldier is not a sub-Christian activity. In Luke 3, John the Baptist warns the people to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. The crowds respond favorably to his message and ask him, “What then shall we do?” John tells the rich man to share his tunics, the tax collectors to collect only what belongs to them, and the soldiers to stop their extortion. If ever there was a time to tell the soldiers that true repentance meant resigning from the army, surely this was the time. And yet, John does not tell them that they must give up soldier-work to bear fruit, only that they need to be honest soldiers. The Centurion is even held up by Jesus as the best example of faith he’s seen in Israel (Luke 7:9). Military service, when executed with integrity and in the Spirit of God, is a suitable vocation for the people of God. ....

4. Love of country can be a good thing. As Christians we have dual citizenship. Our first and ultimate allegiance must always be to Christ whose heavenly dwelling is our eternal home. But we are also citizens of an earthly country. We will stand before God not as individuals wiped clean of all earthly nationality, but as people with distinct languages, cultural affinities, and homelands. It is not wrong to love our distinct language, culture, or nationality. Whenever I’m at a ball game I still get choked up during the singing of the National Anthem. I think this is good. Love for God does not mean we love nothing else on earth, but rather that we learn to love the things on earth in the right way and with the right proportions and priorities. Love of country is a good thing, and it is right to honor those who defend the principles that make our country good. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "Why Christians Should Give Thanks for Memorial Day," Clearly Reformed, May 26, 2025.

Are you religious?

In an interesting essay reviewing a book about the role of "religion" in government, a few paragraphs explaining the original understanding of the word:

The English term “religion,” or the Latin religio, originally derives from the Latin verb religare, or “to bind again” (as in “ligation”). The noun religio, in the classical sense, was not conceived as a specific set of beliefs or propositional truth-claims among others. Rather, it was a sort of virtue or characteristic: one who is “religious” has the property of holding fast, or fidelity. That is why the term “religious life,” in the Middle Ages, was not a descriptor of one’s personal theological conviction. Rather, it referred to those who had bound themselves to a particular monastic or lay rule of life. In other words, almost everyone was Christian, but the phrase “the religious” referred to those who’d adopted a particular set of intense devotional practices.

On this older paradigm, individuals exemplifying the virtue of religio were those capable of seeing God as “what He is, namely the summit of all goodness, the truth of things, the light by which the mind operates” and so choosing to “sedulously revere Him in act, in goodness, in truthfulness of speech, in clarity of mind, in love,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes. On this view, crucially, religion was not something other than natural; rather, it was a particular disposition toward the apex or limit condition of reality itself. “Since philosophia is the love and pursuit of truth and wisdom, and since truth and wisdom are, precisely, God, it follows that true philosophia and true religio are identical.” ....

“Religion” is not some zone of private belief or set of axiomatic commitments; rather, theology is the love and knowledge of God that orients the Christian way of life. It cannot be privatized, interiorized, or ever depoliticized. ....

John Ehrett, "The Problem with 'Religion'," Mere Orthodoxy, May 19, 2026.

Grievance culture

From the author of Therapy Nation, who is himself a psychotherapist:

Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.

The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. ....

The patient becomes good at explanation, more sophisticated in the language of harm, and more certain about who is to blame, but no closer to actual change. Grievance becomes part of identity.

That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics. Ordinary frustration becomes proof of mistreatment. Ambivalence becomes danger. Disagreement becomes evidence of harm. Once enough people are trained to interpret discomfort this way, coexisting with others starts to feel impossible. ....

The same therapeutic scripts that encourage patients to pathologize difficult bosses and disappointing partners now teach citizens to reinterpret ordinary democratic differences as evidence of danger. The result is a society less capable of living with differences, less able to tolerate friction, and more likely to retreat into emotionally curated silos and echo chambers. .... (more)

Jonathan Alpert, "Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?" The Free Press, May 15, 2026.

A pretty good guide for decent behavior

Gene Autry's "Cowboy Code" for his young fans:

1. 
   The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.
10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

"Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle"

From "Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years":

Moral advice is everywhere in Johnson’s work, not just the essays that expressly deal with ethical questions. In an age obsessed with taxonomy, the codification of knowledge, the scientific revolution, with understanding and categorising everything, Johnson was a voice of warning. Knowledge can be ordered. People cannot. He spent his whole life in the struggle for peace of mind. As a moralist, that was what he wrote about. Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle.

Much of Johnson’s insight captures the worser side of human nature, about which he is obdurately, provocatively truthful. He wants to expose all parts of the human mind to reason, to understanding. He knows about all the little vanities of man. ....

Johnson was able to specify any number of human frailties. Many of his sharpest lines come not from his essays, but were delivered to someone’s face. Johnson was not a lurker, a moralist who only let his thoughts out on the page; everywhere he went, Johnson preached. But he was generous, pragmatic, concerned not just to puncture hypocrisy, but to genuinely encourage better living. “I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.” Johnson combined strict ideals with a deep understanding of how hard it was to live up to them. He knew that most of all from personal experience. ....

Johnson contracted to start work on the Dictionary in 1746; he finished in 1755. He was forty-six. The Dictionary is an extraordinary accomplishment of scholarship, composition, and imagination to come from just one mind. But it was not all Johnson did in those years. In 1748 he published his most successful poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. Starting in 1750, he wrote the Rambler, a twice-weekly essay, with topics covering religion, morality, literature, social manners, psychology, marriage, and many other topics. The Rambler was published for over two years, more than two hundred essays in total. From 1758–1760, Johnson wrote the Idler, another set of essays, simpler and more direct than the Rambler. In 1759, he wrote Rasselas, a philosophical novella which has been described as having more wisdom than any other book by multiple writers and critics. All the while, he was often slowly working at his edition of Shakespeare. And there were minor works, too. .... (more)

Henry Oliver, Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years," The Common Reader, May 4, 2026.

What did Lincoln say at Gettysburg?

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) is available on Amazon Prime for a modest rental fee and on YouTube, also for a fee. If you've never seen it, you probably should. It stars Charles Laughton and is a comedy, but has one scene that always gets to me. I watched that scene again recently:

Propaganda of the deed

A few posts ago, the subject was the American essay. That author indicated several essayists he still considered worth reading. One was Gary Saul Morson, at that point unfamiliar to me. Today I came across his "The Terrorist Mind," from which:

The Russian terrorist movement, which began in the 1870s, had reached prodigious dimensions by the beginning of the 20^th century. Between October 1905 and the end of 1907, some 4,500 government officials, and about the same number of private individuals, were killed or injured in terrorist attacks. ....

Who were these terrorists? Except in rare circumstances, they came not from the oppressed working class or peasantry, but from the ranks of the highly educated or prominent. Resorting to terror, in this time and place, had become almost mundane and unexceptional. ....

Commentators spoke of “revolutionism,” that is, revolution, apart from what might follow it, as a goal in itself. Along with art for art’s sake, there was terror for terror’s sake.

Parallels suggesting we may be at an early stage of the Russian experience come readily to mind. As in Russia, alleged recent murderers and attempted murderers have been anything but uneducated. Luigi Mangione, accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, was the valedictorian of a Baltimore private school, founded his own game development company, and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science in engineering from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Cole Allen, the alleged shooter at the Washington Correspondents’ Association Dinner, graduated from Caltech. He explained that he was not himself oppressed, but acting on behalf of those who were: “Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on?” he asked. The most famous Russian terrorists made similar avowals.

Highly prestigious institutions seem especially receptive to violent ideologies. Within hours of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, 34 Harvard student organizations rushed to express their approval. Such thinking results not from mental imbalance, ignorance, or irrationality. On the contrary, it issues from ideologies claiming to advance “social justice” and viewing murder not just as morally permitted, but as morally necessary. Somebody had to do it! As Allen explained, “I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack.” ....

The world’s greatest political novel, Dostoevsky’s Demons, examined the beginnings of the terrorist movement in the 1870s. The novel portrays the revolutionaries harshly, but not so harshly as the smug, cowardly liberals who apologize for them, both because liberal support allows the radicals to succeed and because terrorism reveals what is already implicit in some liberal doctrines. ....

“In my novel Demons,” Dostoevsky wrote in an essay, “I attempted to depict those...motives by which even the purest of hearts and most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offense” as political murder. When violence becomes fashionable, anything, literally anything, can be justified, and more than likely, will eventually be done. “And therein lies the real horror,” Dostoevsky concluded, “that...one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain!” .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "The Terrorist Mind," The Free Press, May 4, 2026.

"The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!"

From Patrick Kurp's "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also" on William Cowper:

Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful:

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

Cowper’s metaphors often mingle playfulness and precision. A bauble is a plaything, a toy or trinket. Cowper finds in them an endorsement of his faith.

Patrick Kurp, "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also," Anecdotal Evidence, May 3, 2026.

The contemporary essay

Patrick Kurp has come across an essay he saved, “What’s Wrong With the American Essay.” First, a portion he quotes from it, and then some of his reaction:

“The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization.”

Things have only gotten worse in subsequent decades. Contemporary essays are characterized principally by the writer’s desire to impress readers with his sensitivity and virtue, usually of a political nature, as though the essay were a form of loyalty oath. Of course, a few first-rate essayists are still at work, still getting published: Cynthia Ozick (age 98), Joseph Epstein (89), Gary Saul Morson (78), Theodore Dalrymple (76), Peter Hitchens (74). All are lineal descendants of the father of essays, Montaigne.... (more)

I read anything I come across by Epstein, Dalrymple, or Peter Hitchens.

Patrick Kurp, "Our Essayists Have Defected," Anecdotal Evidence, May 2, 2026.

May Day

Once upon a time, May Day had nothing to do with politics:

We've been a-rambling all this night,
And sometime of this day;
And now returning back again
We bring a branch of May.

A branch of May we bring you here,
And at your door it stands;
It is a sprout well budded out,
The work of the Lord's hands.

The hedges and trees they are so green,
As green as any leek;
Our Heavenly Father, He watered them
With His heavenly dew so sweet.

The heavenly gates are open wide,
Our paths are beaten plain;
And if a man be not too far gone,
He may return again.

So dear, so dear as Christ loved us,
And for our sins was slain,
Christ bids us turn from wickedness
Back to the Lord again.

The moon shines bright, the stars give a light,
A little before it is day,
So God bless you all, both great and small,
And send you a joyful May.

The Mayers' Song

When May Day was about things like May Poles and May Baskets and the celebration of the coming of Spring.

Happy May Day!

The verse and the illustration are from The Children's Book of Rhymes, by Cicely Mary Barker

St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

For nonestablishment

In the introduction to this essay, the editor notes that "Christian nationalists... [contend that] the antidote to declining religiosity and deteriorating morals is a state-established church (either tacitly established or more formally)." On the contrary:

...Walker made the case that when a state declares itself the arbiter and defender of religion, the results are both predictable and regrettable. “The historical record is unbeaten,” he concluded, “in nationalized Christianity corrupting true religion.” A far better scenario, Walker suggests, is religious nonestablishment.

A Baptist theologian critiquing state religion is not exactly newsworthy: Baptist support for religious nonestablishment is, after all, a rich tradition. It’s no coincidence that when Thomas Jefferson wrote to assure a group of religious minorities that government should erect “a wall of separation between church and state,” he was writing to a group of Baptists. ....

This struck me for a couple of reasons. First, it runs counter to everything I believe as a Christian about the ideal relationship between church and state. To be clear, I am not a strict separationist. I believe the First Amendment protects religious individuals and groups, allowing them to engage the public square without government interference. And the best method for guaranteeing a thriving relationship between church and state is a robust and generous nonestablishment of religion, inasmuch as it keeps the government far away from religious traditions and institutions.

But the second reason—and why I’m writing this essay—is that it runs counter to everything I know as a social scientist about why and when religion flourishes in a given society. ....

...[N]onestablishment provides more benefits for American religion than any establishment regime ever could. Conservatives should grasp this more easily than anyone, with our healthy (and justified) skepticism of government power and influence over the lives of its people. We should cheer legal decisions that keep the state out of the business of religious traditions, denominations, and worshippers. Cultural pressures, real and disruptive as they are, are nothing new to the church and its history of resilience in proclaiming the gospel. .... (more)

Daniel Bennett, "A State Church Isn’t a Panacea for Cultural Problems," The Dispatch, April 26, 2026.

My kind of conservatism

Like many of my conservative friends who once felt comfortable in the GOP, I've felt homeless and alienated for the last decade. I endure the Trump era and hope for a restoration of what is known as "fusionism" in American conservatism. I'm not particularly optimistic (that may be a conservative trait). From "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism":

The last decade was unkind to pro-freedom conservatives. Those of us who still find merit in the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, limited government, moral traditionalism, and global leadership increasingly look like anachronisms. In the age of MAGA, a variety of insurgent factions—including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers—compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.

This is not the first time the American right has been little more than a loose collection of competing dogmas. In the years following World War II, the American right encompassed a jumble of ideological impulses. One faction included traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, who themselves disagreed on fundamental questions. Pro-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek exerted enormous influence, despite insisting they were not conservatives at all. Ayn Rand’s anti-religion Objectivists, the remnants of the Southern Agrarians, and conspiracy-minded cranks like Robert Welch likewise all occupied space within the broader right-wing ecosystem.

The eventual consolidation of several of these factions into a recognizable conservative movement was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required intellectual leadership, institutional development, and a willingness to draw lines. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review were indispensable in this endeavor. Conservatives sought to build a tent large enough to contain a winning coalition, but not so large that it welcomed figures and beliefs antithetical to the movement itself.

The postwar conservative intellectual movement never lacked disagreement, but it eventually established a framework capable of containing and promoting its best elements. The political approach that was eventually named fusionism played an important role in maintaining an uneasy but influential coalition. Fusionism’s leading proponents also provided a principled argument against one of the right’s most persistent temptations: populism. Their arguments have largely been forgotten. They are worth recovering.

Fusionism, most associated with National Review editor Frank Meyer, emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence. .... (more)

National Review and The Dispatch remain home to many fusionist conservative writers.

George Hawley, "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism," The Dispatch, April 24, 2026.

Positive thinking

This reminded me of the argument that optimists are often disappointed while pessimists may be happily surprised. From "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy":

In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem. “Unhappiness is both a political state and a mental health crisis,” wrote Tara D. Sonenshine in The Hill in 2024. In a Guardian piece last month, therapists described patients who became “depressed” by political stress.

Despite the narrative that it’s a disease to be treated, unhappiness is totally normal.

Humans aren’t designed to be happy all the time. ....

In recent decades, there’s been an obsession with improving “mental health.” But the concept of “mental health” has so many vague definitions that anyone the least bit unhappy is presumably “mentally unwell.” Therapy culture has taught us to attend closely to our emotions because anything negative supposedly might be the early sign of something serious and merit professional intervention. ....

A purely positive attitude, meanwhile, isn’t always a cognitive asset. Research on goal achievement finds that total optimists who fantasize about success often underperform those who realistically imagine obstacles. College graduates who fantasized about getting a job, for example, got fewer offers and earned less two years later than graduates who were filled with more doubt and worry. .... (more)

Carolyn D. Gorman, "Don't Worry, Be Unhappy," The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2026.

On this day in 1775