Here at Hacienda Holland, we enjoy watching the PBS show “Finding Your Roots”—where each week three celebrities, politicians and other people of note have their family trees researched by professionals and learn previously unknown and often startling facts about their ancestors. It’s a fascinating and often quite moving viewing experience. For example, this week’s episode profiled the […]
In the 1850s and ’60s, courageous writers exposed readers to the horrors of slavery and the Abolitionist Movement was born. In the early 1900s, Upton Sinclair pulled back the curtain and gave America a horrifying look at the meat-packing industry, triggering a public outcry that produced significant reforms. In the same era, other journalists, who […]
Fourteen years later, the best guide to understanding how the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. were planned and executed remains Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. It is a masterwork of research, journalism and storytelling. It is also a powerful inoculation against the brain-warping disease of […]
To achieve equality of outcome among all people (as opposed to equal opportunity) the government must keep us from failing. To keep us from failing requires preventing us from making bad choices. To keep us from making bad choices requires eliminating choice. This is the inescapable logic of egalitarianism and the reason why all socialist projects end in totalitarianism and […]
Before I just let it go and move on, I thought I’d point out one additional annoying, yea, even galling aspect of the way the writers of Mad Men chose to rescue Don Draper from his eight-year-long free-fall of drink, deception, and debauchery. That is, to have him stagger into a touchy-feely retreat center built around a […]
The series Mad Men ended the other night after a celebrated eight-year, seven-season run. The show was consistently brilliant in many respects. Amazingly executed, written and performed. But I was a little slow on the uptake where the series was concerned—in more ways than one. For one thing, I didn’t start watching until midway through […]
It’s been a while since I’ve submitted an installment of my runaway hit blog series “We’ve Seen This Before.” An email flooded in this week asking if a new installment was in the works (thanks, honey) so I thought I’d tap out another one of these little exercises in historical perspective. I wrote the first of these […]
Just a couple of additional clarifying (hopefully) thoughts about my previous post on theologically conservative Christians’ accelerating embrace of the term social justice. First, note the qualifier in the sentence above—“theologically conservative.” The fact is, theologically liberal Christians have been waving the social justice flag for more than 100 years. For example, I recently read a fascinating book […]
Few things in life give me more pure pleasure than visiting a faraway place I’ve never seen. That delight is doubled when the place is rich with historical and biblical significance. Add to this the opportunity to have my bride along for the ride and . . . well, that’s the trifecta. A few days ago […]
You’ll find the first installment of this series here. The premise is that we’re living at a time in which it’s easy to think we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of global dysfunction and entropy. Yes, a lot of ugly and troubling things are happening. But we’re also victims of the 24-hour news cycle and instant video from […]
