Last LicksPhilanthropy Daily

Dear Intelligent American,

As has been noted before, this missive’s salutation is borrowed from late boss William F. Buckley Jr., who commenced his magazine subscription appeals in this complimentary way. 2025 will mark his centennial, and National Review—the journal he founded in 1955—has published a special edition about this profoundly important man. Find it here.

The new year approaches, mixing resolutions with the seasonal habit of recommendations. The good people at Belmont Abbey College (what a special institution) have produced a most interesting and free series which we recommend: The Political Thought of Michael Novak. The course guide looks terrific:

• The Ideal of Democratic Capitalism from Emmett McGroarty
• John Paul II, Politics, and Economics from George Weigel
• Why Catholics Cannot Support Socialism from Catherine Pakaluk
• What Can Theology Contribute to Economics? from Jay Richards
• Are We Still A Tocquevillian Nation? from Joe Wysocki

Another profoundly important man, Michael was a pal (and also the religion editor of National Review), and is, like WFB, sorely missed. Let us let this recommendation also double as Your Intrepid Correspondent’s personal resolution (take the course!) for 2025.

(Prayer: Let there be no quizzes or final.)

Read While Sipping a Cup of Kindness

1. At America Magazine, Bill Smith shares his bio as one who was among, and who serves, the homeless. From the article:

You say you want to help the homeless? Here’s a crazy thought: Why don’t you ask somebody who’s homeless what they want, and listen to what they have to say? What a concept, right? But paternalism seems to be the default approach in interactions with folks who are homeless. Plenty of times I’ve had people who don’t even know me tell me what I need or why I’m homeless. That, I think, is part of the problem.

Homeless people sometimes like to blame others for their mistakes, which is a temptation for anybody. But at some point you have to look in the mirror and say, “Well, maybe I’m the person who did that.” Some people figure that out. Others spend their entire life playing the blame game. But it takes a lot of motivation and hard work to get out of homelessness. You won’t make it by sitting back and having a pity party.

2. At National Review, Neal B. Freeman articulates the place in the American Story of William F. Buckley Jr., whose centennial approaches. From the piece:

Remember the historical circumstance. After the Eisenhower moderates had crushed the Taft conservatives, America at mid century found herself with two great political parties: a tendentiously left party, the Democrats, and a staunchly centrist party, the Republicans. Lionel Trilling’s words have survived these many years because they were so perfectly apt. Conservative resistance in this country, Trilling observed of the time, amounted to little more than a series of “irritable mental gestures.”

It is important to remember, then, that Bill Buckley did not resuscitate American conservatism. He did not rejigger it. He created it. And as we all know, it is more difficult—more difficult by orders of magnitude—to create something new than to maintain something old.

Under Bill’s loose and avuncular supervision, we all developed our own philosophical frameworks, congenially related to his, of course, but tailored to accommodate our individual predispositions.

I can tell you how my own developed. As I read more history, I began to hear the American story as one endless and endlessly fascinating conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The question that engaged them was this: Where in the American polity should we place the locus of power? Should we place it at the periphery, with what we hope is the enlightened individual, as Jefferson argued? Or should we place it close to the hub, with what we hope is a benevolent central authority, as Hamilton argued?

3. At Modern Age, Bradley “Double B” Birzer lauds C. S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury for their role in en-souling the genre of science fiction. From the essay:

One only has to imagine possibilities to be in the realm of science fiction. Imagine a species in which there are six genders. Imagine blowing up the sun. Imagine a planet where a duke becomes a messiah, a god, a conqueror of the universe, and then a blind prophet. Imagine fascism arising in America. Imagine totalitarianism being so pervasive that the leader is called Big Brother. Imagine black people solving the racial problem by a mass exodus from this racist planet. Imagine a world in which everyone lives in paradise until being executed at the age of thirty. Imagine a place in which genetics have gone so far as to create supermen and superwomen. Imagine a wagon train to the stars. Imagine . . .

In his seminal essay “On Science Fiction,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “The proper study of man is everything.” He continued, “The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.”

Ray Bradbury said something similar several years later. “Over and above everything, the writer in this field [science fiction] has a sense of being confronted by dozens of paths that move among the thousand mirrors of a carnival maze, seeing his society imagined and re-imaged and distorted by the light thrown back at him,” he wrote in Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures. “Without moving anything but his typewriter, that immensely dependable Time Machine, the writer can take those paths and examine those billion images.”

4. At Law & Liberty, Titus Techera, movie buff, checks into Holiday Inn. From the reflection:

A funny thing about Holiday Inn is that everything seems to happen twice. The singing of White Christmas, Bing losing his love to Fred, Bing meeting cute with Marjorie. Christmas Eve happens twice and the calendar year visual gag is repeated, too, juxtaposing the realities of work with the beautification of showmanship. Partly for that reason, it’s a film worth watching at least twice; the first time around, Bing looks innocent and cruelly put upon—the second time, not so much.

Bing is a superior artist and faces a problem all artists must now face: Is America some kind of sophisticated lie they tell to easily fool audiences, merely a song and dance? Or is it a reality they have to come to understand, including finding their place in it, which is much more at the mercy of audiences than spellbinding them? Orchestrating the national memory is no mere joke and it does suggest artists have remarkable power in America, but that it accrues slowly over time, as each generation looks to remember its formative years.

In the end then, keeping his distance from the country, from Hollywood, and from the girl turns out to be impossible for Bing. What seems like conventions of romantic comedy, or demands we as an audience make on our artists (such as giving us a happy end), turns out also to be part of the artist’s education for freedom, encouraging a certain daring and risk-taking which we all share in at least at a national scale. There’s always room for something new with us, and the surprise of Holiday Inn is that what seems most wholesome, folksy, and even naive is the proper way to explore the difficulties of modern life, including the problem of the artist in a commercial society.

5. At The European Conservative, Itxu Díaz dunks on DINKs. From the piece:

Lacking a goal to pursue that they can boast about, DINKs focus their proselytizing on hatred of their parents’ way of life. The effectiveness of their message, and the popularity of the phenomenon, is explained by the TikTok audience. Ultimately, the DINK message resonates perfectly with people who are not yet ready for parenthood. That call of nature does not usually appear at the age of 18, but a little later, which is when one begins to think for the first time that one could die any day and that, short of children, all one is going to take to the grave is an immense succession of empty hangovers. This is from the masculine point of view, From the feminine point of view, a certain longing for motherhood naturally arises from the woman’s bundle of instincts. As such, when a man tries to run away unhealthily from fatherhood, it is women who are best placed to inject some common sense into proceedings. If all reproduction hinged upon the whims of men, perhaps we would have become extinct by the Stone Age.

Be that as it may, fighting against nature is a lousy idea, not least because sooner or later nature will exact her revenge—and often in a quite painful way. If what they seek is happiness, they may not know it, but by prioritizing their selfishness over the most elementary needs of their nature, they stand to obtain nothing but a spectacular vital failure. A diagnosis of the immediate future: DINK, give yourself a few years, and you will find yourself contending with all you were not looking for—unhappiness, boredom, depression, and the feeling of having thrown your life overboard. And the worst thing: often, when you realize it, there will be no turning back.

6. More Itxu: At Tablet Magazine, he finds Europe is cancelling Christmas. From the article:

The trend of canceling Christmas in European schools didn’t start this year, it simply spreads from one December to the next like an oil slick at sea. The first major controversy occurred in 2011, when kindergartens and schools in Denmark canceled their traditional Christmas celebrations so as not to offend Muslims, who are already the second-largest religion in the country, and who are densely concentrated in ghettos in large cities.

France, the European country with the most immigrants of Arab origin, has also been de-Christianizing Christmas for years. After the jihadist attack against a Christmas market in Strasbourg in 2018, far from redoubling the defense of freedom and pride in their Christian traditions, political leaders intensified the secularist drift, and this year there are already a majority of French cities whose authorities have decided to eliminate Christian referencing in Christmas celebrations, sometimes going to ridiculous extremes. Nantes is now celebrating its “Winter Journey” (whatever that means), Angers is observing “Winter Suns,” Bordeaux is touting “Bordeaux in festivities,” and Saint Denis is holding a Christmas vacation called “Destination Beautiful Winter” while its mayor celebrates the holiday by shouting “Happy Winter!” The official festive brochure of this French community includes puppets, fire-eaters, craft workshops for children, and no iconic Christian Christmas imagery.

7. At The American Conservative, Joseph Addington finds that a year of incumbency shows that Argentina’s free-market president, Javier Milei, has been vindicated. From the beginning of the piece:

Upon entering office, Milei implemented an effective program of shock therapy. He cut the number of government ministries in half, slashed thousands of regulations, and implemented dramatic budget cuts. With a small minority in the Argentine Congress, he carefully ushered through legislation to privatize many of Argentina’s moribund state-owned companies, simplify the tax code, and eliminate some existing welfare programs while streamlining the remainder. He also clamped down on the Argentine central bank, reducing the issuance of new money (although that policy loosened somewhat later in his presidency). He also loosened Argentina’s currency controls, which devalued the peso but brought official exchange rates much closer to the real exchange rates.

Milei’s program achieved excellent short-term results, at a cost. The budget cuts ended deficit spending, producing the first budget surplus for many years. Without the excess money being ploughed into the economy from government welfare programs, inflation dropped rapidly—monthly inflation declined to just 2.4 percent in November 2024, the lowest rate in 4 years and a far cry from the 125 percent a month at the beginning of his term.

8. At Civitas Outlook, Ryan Bangert urges the rehabilitation instead of the uprooting of America’s institutions. From the essay:

America has long been a land of institutions. Alexis De Tocqueville observed, “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations” both “immensely large and very minute.” This includes everything from hospitals and schools to seminaries and churches. These institutions exist between, and in conversation with, the divided and limited governments outlined in the federal and state constitutions and the seminal institution of the family—the origin of “the little platoon we belong to in society” and “the germ as it were . . . of public affections.”

The legacy of this tradition remains with us to this day. Our landscape is filled with the physical instantiations of churches and synagogues, public and private schools, community colleges and ivy-covered universities, government buildings and places of business, and family homes, to name a few. These institutions comprise an ecosystem connected by the people who inhabit them and play distinct but intertwined roles within each.

But these institutions do more than occupy physical space. As Yuval Levin recognized, they “are by their nature formative.” Throughout our nation’s history, they served as the molds through which individuals were made fit contributors to society. Levin continues: “They structure our perceptions and our interactions, and as a result they structure us.” When our institutions flourish, they “make us more decent and responsible—habituating us in exactly the sorts of virtues a free society requires.”

9. At City Journal, Harry Stein, commenting on the coverage of the infamous “Duke Lacrosse Case,” assures that there will be no media apologies. From the article:

In brief, the coverage conveyed not even a fleeting sense of what the Duke case meant at the time, how fully the story gripped the nation, dividing Americans by race and class; how, indeed, it anticipated much of what was to follow in the Trayvon Martin case; in Ferguson, Missouri; in the furious aftermath of the death of George Floyd; and, hardly least, in exposing the rot at the heart of two of America’s key institutions that has since become ever more apparent—academia and journalism.

All these years later, the media’s perfunctory coverage of Mangum’s admission is telling precisely because of what, given the calamitous mis-coverage of the original story, it so conspicuously lacks: self-awareness and accountability.

For most in the army of reporters who besieged Durham in 2006, the narrative of a poor black stripper violently gang-raped by privileged white male jocks was irresistible, confirming as it did the view of racial and power dynamics so pervasive in their circles. Never mind that there was no corroborating physical evidence of rape or sodomy and firm proof that at least one of the accused was elsewhere at the time of the alleged attack. This was not merely another instance of a story too good to be checked: there was no way it could not to be true, so it needed no substantiation. So fixed was the attitude that it endured for months, despite increasingly compelling evidence to the contrary.

10. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno advises that employment opportunities and success can greatly benefit from honest career-navigation systems. From the article:

Career navigation systems respond to the needs of Americans who want to create a map that sets personal career goals and education and training pathways to good jobs and careers. Accurate employment information is essential for these programs that map pathways to greater economic and social opportunity.

Putting this information in the hands of American workers fosters opportunity pluralism, an approach that encourages multiple pathways to work, careers, and opportunity. Opportunity pluralism aims to ensure that every individual—regardless of background—has pathways to acquiring the knowledge, networks, and personal agency needed for career success.

This makes the nation’s opportunity structure more pluralistic, allowing individuals to pursue opportunity through many avenues linked to labor-market demands. Career navigation systems are a vital approach to ensuring individuals gain the economic and social benefits of work, flourish in life, and reach their potential.

11. At World Magazine, Hans Fiene opines on shock jocks and late-night talk-show hosts who are prodigal and still lost. From the article:

As a former creep turned leftist scold, Kimmel is similar to reformed shock jock Howard Stern, who has also spent recent years lashing out at Trump-supporting or COVID-skeptical conservatives. For decades, Stern never met a degenerate he wouldn’t platform or a special needs person he wouldn’t treat like a circus freak. His brand was doing anything to generate ratings. Now he says he doesn’t care if his leftist-defined support for purity and truth has cost him half his audience.

Why would these men risk bringing attention to their tawdry pasts by establishing themselves as the new decency police? Why not leave that task to another court jester, one who may have a skeleton or two in his closet but doesn’t have dozens of them strewn about his living room? I think for both men, the answer is clear: This is what happens when a prodigal son doesn’t know the way home.

12. At First Things, Karl Johann Petersen shares his gay tragedy. From the essay:

Why was I so confused? Why did I flee what I was seeking and seek what I was fleeing? The homoerotic vitality into which I threw myself was, amidst all the suffering, associated with joy, with illustrious encounters and intense experiences, some of which I am still grateful for. Generous hospitality allowed me to spend vacations in France, Switzerland, Poland. I do not want to cut this life off retrospectively—like my grandfather, who one day destroyed all the family photos that included the ex-husbands of his daughters. In this way, of course, many photos of his children and grandchildren disappeared forever. I need to revise my past and yet protect myself from the revision.

I look at everything beautiful in my past as through a filter that imbues things with a doubtful grayness, as if something had been there that didn’t belong, or as if something decisive had always been missing. I must live with tension over the life I regret having lived and regret having renounced.

Renouncing it was hard, harsh. I broke off intimate friendships to avoid temptation. I feel like a recovering alcoholic who must avoid all alcohol. My reserve towards homosexuality is more than justified after all my experiences, if only because of the dangers of infection, which at one point drove me half mad.

Lucky 13. At Verily Magazine, Lauren Meyers looks into her baby daughter’s eyes and finds a bond of womanhood. From the piece:

As we swayed in the kitchen, my daughter illuminated the ethos of womanhood and gave me occasion to reflect on my own femininity. She has already begun to teach and inspire me, as our sons have each done in their own ways. Our differences, including the difference in our genders, have allowed us to complement and instruct one another in love.

I look back at the irksome comments I received during my pregnancy and realize that I had nothing to fear. Embracing our children doesn’t mean ignoring their differences; it means embracing each of them as unique individuals with their own gifts, including their masculinity and femininity.

Our daughter is not a missing piece we needed to acquire. She is, like every human being, a gift received in love.

Bonus. At The New York Post, Eric Spitznagel lauds the lasts of their kinds. From the beginning of the article:

The narrow cobblestone streets of Ystad, a remote village in southern Sweden, looks like something out of an advent calendar.

Watching over the half-timbered homes and Gothic architecture is a 13th-century church “whose dark spire towered over the medieval market town like a witch’s hat,” writes Eliot Stein in his new book, “Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive” (St. Martin’s Press), out now.

And at the very top of that church tower, 14 stories up and reachable only by a rickety spiral staircase, is 74-year-old Roland Borg, one of the world’s last night watchmen.

His job, writes Stein, is to blow a “haunting, bellowed cry” with a four-foot-long copper horn, “reassuring the town’s 29,000 residents that all is well.”

Bonus Bonus. At The Dispatch, John and Lauren McCormack, a decade patient, have a baby, and she has a name. From the piece:

On the morning of December 24, 2023, we were holding hands while attending Mass at John’s parents’ parish in Madison, Wisconsin. The gospel reading that morning, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, was the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit:

the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.

For nothing will be impossible for God. At that moment, we squeezed each other’s hand, the way we’d squeezed each other’s hand many times before whenever the stories of Sarah and Abraham or Elizabeth and Zechariah—couples miraculously blessed with a child after many years of infertility—were read aloud in church.

The squeeze was meant to silently convey a sense of hope that God might still bless us with a miracle after a decade of infertility.

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Jordan Smith reports on some sound philanthropic investment in reading. Read it here.

Due. The Center for Civil Society hosts its important “In the Trenches” Master Class on Strategic Planning this January 30^th, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern, via Zoom). Nonprofit leaders who are contemplating the need for, and the benefit of, having an actionable strategic plan would be well-advised to attend. Get more information right here.

Tre. More PD: Andrew Fowler … you do. Gotta read. Right here. 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Where did the chef celebrate New Year’s Eve?

A: Thymes Square.

A Dios

To quote the lame jokester, “See you next year.”

May the Alpha and the Omega Bestow Graces Upon All,

Jack Fowler, who is wistful at jfowler@amphile.com.

P.S.: Thank you, Lorna, for sweeping up after the elephant.