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Jan 14, 2025 | 
commentary.org | Wilfred M. McClay
Among the challenges facing the Democratic Party in its climb back from a disastrous 2024 defeat is the fact that, despite being the oldest active political party in the world, it no longer has much of a usable past. In times of crisis, the possession of such a past can be an immense asset, providing a defeated faction with the strength to get up off the mat and get back into the fight.
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Dec 24, 2024 | 
city-journal.org | Wilfred M. McClay
Like many Americans, I’ve not been terribly fond of Emmanuel Macron. He seemed to be a technocratic leader who has managed to hold the presidential office in France for the past seven years strictly faute de mieux—for lack of a more acceptable, or less alarming, alternative. But Macron and his administration have just made a gift to the whole world this Christmas with the successful restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the greatest and most venerable of Europe’s medieval cathedrals.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
thepublicdiscourse.com | Wilfred M. McClay
Editors’ Note: This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Hillsdale, Michigan, on December 1, 2024. The transcript has been edited slightly for clarity and length and was republished with the author’s permission. I have a very high opinion of Christmas carols. But let’s face it: we are about to be inundated with them, both the religious and the secular ones. Perhaps far more of the latter than the former. And that is perhaps a regrettable fact.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Wilfred M. McClay
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
city-journal.org | Wilfred M. McClay
The corrupted state of American higher education has become a primary item on the national agenda. The ever-ballooning expense of college, coupled with growing doubts about the value of what our colleges are fostering—and not fostering—in our young people, has brought long-simmering discontent to a boil. More Americans are considering the possibility that higher education may not be worth it for themselves or their children.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
theimaginativeconservative.org | Wilfred M. McClay
Every technology, even writing itself, has its drawbacks, and we must be alert to the distinction among information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, by Roger Kimball (360 pages, Saint Augustine’s Press, 2012)For those who cherish the life of the mind, one of the saddest events of 2012 was the death of the great historian Jacques Barzun. If a loss can be said to be pregnant with meaning, this one surely was.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Stuart Halpern |Akiva Schick |Wilfred M. McClay
New York University Press 336 pp., $35 On May 5, 1892, the insurance broker and former Civil War general Frederick George d’Utassy was found unconscious in a gas-filled hotel room in Wilmington, Delaware. He died the next day. The exact cause of death, like much of d’Utassy’s life, remains shrouded in mystery. After all, d’Utassy wasn’t his real name, and he wasn’t a real general. One of the many colorful characters in Adam D.
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Jun 10, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | J. Eric Wise |Jesse Merriam |William Voegeli |Wilfred M. McClay
I came up for air after a recent corporate board fight—a governance wrangle over the removal of certain company directors—and picked up a copy of For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson. The book examines the purposes of corporations and what they did or do, from Rome to the present day.
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May 22, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Wilfred M. McClay
This year has witnessed an upsurge in intense and often violent protests on university campuses. Their immediate pretext is the war in Gaza, which commenced with Hamas’s savage and unprovoked attack on Israel on Oct. 7. But everyone can see that these protests reflect a broader problem: the failure of our most eminent universities to insist that their students show fundamental respect for their fellow students and our nation’s laws and civic institutions.
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May 9, 2024 | 
theaquilareport.com | Wilfred M. McClay
C.S. Lewis described his own conversion to Christianity, from a fashionable and rather mindless form of atheism heavily tinged with late Romanticism; and he depicts that transformation as beginning with the unexpected effects of a chance reading of George MacDonald’s book Phantastes on a train ride. Lewis says very clearly that, even in the wake of this “baptism” of the imagination, the development of his intellect and conscience was just beginning—in fact, was yet to begin.
