Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.

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

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

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.