In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that optimism is a psychological condition and generally fatuous, while hope is a theological virtue, in public affairs as in life more generally.

In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.

“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”

Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].

“If truth is relative, to what is it relative?”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News June 2, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“The Modern Mind is so called to distinguish it from the Mind.”

G.K. Chesterton in America March 15, 1930, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.

“No sooner has a man’s conscience told him to doubt a certain institution than the man’s modern intelligence immediately tells him to doubt his conscience. Thus most modern revolution is in secret revolt against itself.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Nov. 17 1906, quoted in “Intelligence” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)