John Brown's Notes and Essays

By Fareed Zakaria   Columnist The Washington Post , November 28, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. EST President Trump, with first lady Melania Trump looking on, pardons Butter the turkey in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s a secular celebration of America, and as an immigrant, I feel I have much to be grateful for. I am an optimist who tends to see the story of this country as one of addressing its shortcomings and making progress. Lately, it has been tough to maintain that sunny outlook. America’s greatest assets — its constitutional republic and its democratic character — seem to be in danger of breakdown.  Listen to the language of the president. “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage,”  he thundered at a June rally  to kick off his reelection campaign. “They want to destroy you, and they want to destroy our country...

The U.S. has an unmatched capacity for absorbing newcomers. Yet historian David M. Kennedy worries that the country no longer agrees on a shared identity or purpose. By Jason Willick, The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 27, 2019 ILLUSTRATION:  KEN FALLIN Stanford, Calif. As the Seventh U.S. Army prepared to seize Axis-held Sicily in July 1943, Gen. George S. Patton sent the troops a message. “When we land,” Patton said, “we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy.” Patton is famous for his martial exhortations, but Stanford historian David M. Kennedy paraphrases his Sicily address to highlight what it said about immigration. “Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, Patton said, “but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty,” whereas the Germans and Italians targeted in the Allied assault chose to remain “as slave...

Elizabeth Bruenig, The New York Review of Books , November 21, 2019 Virgin Whore by Emma Maggie Solberg Cornell University Press, 275 pp., $39.95 The Magdalene in the Reformation by Margaret Arnold Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 300 pp., $29.95 National Gallery, London Robert Campin:  The Virgin and Child Before a Firescreen , circa 1440 In January the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a minor scandal concerning the virtue of the Mother of God. It came to light that an English professor had taught Emmanuel Carrère’s 2014 book  The Kingdom— a self-consciously provocative work about the author’s struggle with his Catholic faith and the unlikely survival of the early Church—to a group of five upperclassmen as part of an elective course in the spring of 2018.  The Kingdom  is something of an odd elegy to faith by an agnostic who finally couldn’t believe, and thus Carrère takes aim at the religion’s more incredible dogmas; t...