Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

America is not just 'a nation with the soul of a church,' as G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1992: it is a nation with the mind of a crusade

If the Bible is a creation myth, it is an amorphous confusing one

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.