As World War Two broke out in Poland, WH Auden wrote about the despair of watching “the clever hopes expire/of a low, dishonest decade.” We are not yet at that pass, but Auden’s poem bears re-reading by anybody trying to read the signs of our increasingly dark and troubled times.There are times when the ideas […]

As regular visitors to this space will have noticed, I have been unusually slow to post during the last week.  This is not because I’m running out of steam as a blogger.  And it’s not because this is a slow news week.  In recent days the European financial crisis took a dark turn for the […]

Life keeps getting worse for President Obama.  It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell.  It is not just that he lost control of Congress in the midterms.  No: the […]

President Obama has begun the second half of his presidential term with a planned ten-day tour of Asia.  Even beneath the haze of skepticism (from critics who accused the President of fleeing the country in the aftermath of the disastrous midterm election) and the clouds of spin (from administration staffers who sought to draw the […]

[Yesterday saw the beginning of The American Interest’s commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial over at The Long Recall. I will be following the Civil War era news day by day on our new aggregator, and from time to time will play Civil War pundit:  writing political commentary on the events of the day as […]

One hundred fifty years ago the election returns led the morning news: Abraham Lincoln gained enough electoral votes against a split Democratic opposition to elect him the 16th President of the United States.  His election would set off first a secession crisis, as South Carolina almost immediately began preparations to secede from the Union, and […]

No president in my lifetime has fallen from heaven to earth as rapidly as President Obama.  Others have lost popularity and lost control of Congress, but none fell from such a height.  Who can forget the rapturous cries of joy when he was elected in 2008?  Who can forget all those predictions of a ‘transformational […]

The midterm elections find the two parties, and the United States, in an uncomfortable position.  Even as it apparently moves toward a major victory, the Republican Party is divided between the Tea Party and the Establishment wings, and it is still haunted by the failure of the last era of Republican rule.  The Democrats, who […]

Last Sunday Via Meadia featured the first part of an essay by my father, Loren B. Mead, in which he reflected on the state of the American church.  Today I am happy to bring you the conclusion.  Please feel free to comment; the Venerable One stands ready to reflect and respond. PART III:  MINISTERING  IN […]

The usefulness of history is not one of those truths that Americans take to be self evident.  Indeed, there’s a long tradition in the United States of thinking that our job is to bury the past, not to wallow in it.“History is bunk,” said Henry Ford; the limits of the past do not and should […]