Marilynne Robinson has, throughout her essays and fiction, looped an iron chord around the twinned facts of faith and the moral self.

Amid a growing consensus that Americans have lost faith in their country, ideas about strengthening institutions, on the one hand, and inspiring individual virtue, on the other, ought to be integrated.

When the President speaks of American exceptionalism, conservatives disbelieve him while liberals cringe. But there is another reaction ascendant, arguing that whether American exceptionalism was once a force for good or for evil, it is now disappearing.

The cultural abdication of adulthood that A.O. Scott describes in this week’s New York Times Magazine is real. We risk leaving to our children the impossible task of loving a world that we don’t respect enough to love ourselves.

Our responses to the economic and political malaise that plagues us are mired in denial and debt. Our real problem is a failure to think.

The U.S. Constitution encompasses two different ideas of liberty that operate in tension.

The middle ground in the tragic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will never be found by insisting on either radically partial Zionist or anti-Zionist narratives that ignore the basic facts.

A Sport of Nature offers is a fictional meditation on the power of spontaneity in politics. It stands for the idea that no matter how dark the world the light of the human spirit can and will shine forth to bring a new day.

“Between Sovereign states there can be no last resort except war; if war no longer serves that purpose, that fact alone proves that we must have a new concept of the state.”

—Hannah Arendt, in an interview with Adelbert Reif, 1970.

The political importance of privacy is plurality. Only when people grow and mature in a protected world of home and hearth can they find the space and freedom to think independently and thus differently.