Allan C. Carlson

Latest by Allan C. Carlson in Chronicles

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  July 2020

  The Case for Christian Distributism

  Christian distributism celebrates the small and the human. It rests on strong home economies and demands the widest possible distribution and ownership of productive property.

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• Reviews

  August 2018

  The Truth About Hungary

  I met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn in May of last year. With a few others, we shared breakfast before the opening session of the second Budapest Demographic Forum. He was every bit the “footballer” I had been told to expect.

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• Reviews

  May 2018

  The Last Ideology

  “Liberalism has failed,” writes University of Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen in his new book with a related title. “Nearly every one of the promises . . . made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered,” he adds.

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• Reviews

  December 2017

  Regional Anthem

  A century ago, the American Midwest was in the ascendant, widely acknowledged as the nation’s vital Heartland, a place characterized by a morally strong and independent populace, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth in land (the classic 160 acre family farm), and true democratic values.

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• Society & Culture

  November 2017

  Too Steep a Price: Why the Liberal Family Died

  Over half a century ago, the family system advocated by John Locke and modeled on Lockean liberalism seemed to have triumphed completely in the United States, in Western Europe, and globally.

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• Society & Culture

  September 2017

  A Conservative Tax Code

  Few American objects attract more scorn than the federal Internal Revenue Code. When initially drafted in 1914, it contained 11,400 words, about the length of a long magazine article.

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  March 2017

  A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?

  As Carle Zimmerman argued, moral implosions and civilizational collapse have happened before, and they have always been followed by periods of renewal. People stumble their way back to the “fundamental mother-source” of civilizational strength: familism.

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• Society & Culture

  December 2016

  A Complete Man: Remembering Terry Kohler

  During the late 1950’s, Terry J. Kohler was a jet pilot with the U.S. Air Force, flying T-33 fighters and B-47 bombers with the Strategic Air Command. Like most others of that tribe whom I have met, the experience gave him an almost startling directness of manner.

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  October 2016

  The Stork Theory

  Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5.

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• Editorials

  October 2016

  The True Source

  Phyllis Schlafly, in the spring of 1973, squared off in debate at Illinois State University against archfeminist Betty Friedan. The subject was the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, at the time just a few states short of ratification.

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• In Memoriam

  October 2015

  John Addison Howard, 1921-2015: A Remembrance

  John Howard, founder of The Rockford Institute (publisher of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture), passed from this world on August 7, 2015, a week shy of his 94th birthday.

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  August 1997

  Euthanasia for Excellence

  On April 10 of last year, the European Patent Office quietly awarded a patent to Michigan State University (MSU) for "euthanasia solutions which use the anesthetic gammahydroxy-butramide (embutramide) as a basis for formulating the composition."

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• Reviews

  July 1997

  Eternity Gained

  In his new novel Wendell Berry returns to the time and the characters found in his earlier and more complex work, A Place on Earth. The atmosphere is familiar: a community subtly unsettled by the distant events of World War II.

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• Reviews

  March 1997

  American Gothic

  The America First cause of 1959-41 finds a powerful, if unusual and indirect, affirmation in E. Bradford Burns' Kinship with the Land: Regionalist Thought in Iowa, 1894-1942.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  October 1996

  Henry Regnery, R.I.P.

  He died on June 18, his devoted wife of six decades, Eleanor, at his side.

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• Reviews

  March 1996

  Lone Star Rising

  In 1972, Bradford rallied to the cause of George Wallace, only to see this last important example of Democratic populism halted by a bullet in the Alabama governor's spine.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  February 1996

  Broad Political Views

  Wendell Berry's new essay collection, Another Turn of the Crank, gives definition to broad political views that the author has previously left obscure. Regarding foreign trade, for example, he asks: "How can any nation or region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the sake of foreign trade?"

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  August 1995

  The Midwestern Identity

  Ask a contemporary American to characterize "the Midwestern identity" and you will likely get, besides much puzzlement, one of two answers.

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• Reviews

  May 1995

  The State of Union

  "I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with," anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. "My family's farm, although dating only to the early 1940's, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied."

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• Reviews

  October 1994

  The Missionary's Son

  Henry Luce both created and dominated a new form of national journalism between 1930 and 1960. Founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Life, and Fortune, he is best remembered for his 1941 Life essay "The American Century," a robust call for the United States to assume world power status.

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