The Oscar festivities Sunday night included a commercial for the biggest historical gambit of the past year, the “1619 Project” of The New York Times. Princeton historian Allen Guelzo says it “is not history; it is conspiracy theory. The 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance”—and you can see by Guelzo’s use of semicolons that he’s an academic who normally doesn’t scream. 

As WORLD’s Effective Compassion podcast continues in its weekly installments, I’d like to take us back 20 years to a time when “compassionate conservatism” was getting huge attention due to presidential candidate George W. Bush’s embrace of it, but widespread confusion remained about what this new idea was all about.

Austin, Texas, styles itself “the live music capital of the world” and a haven for painters and sculptors as well. So do other aspirational cities that have followed a New Urbanism script: gain an artsy reputation so the talented, young, and beautiful will follow. But what about those left behind yet also made in God’s image, including the blind, the disabled, and the homeless? 

Michael Barone, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been an author of the annual Almanac of American Politics ever since its first edition in 1971. When I was a child, I had a teacher who had memorized every word of the Old Testament in Hebrew: Give him the first few words of a verse and he’d be off and running, page after page. Michael’s granular knowledge of American politics is like that: Give him a congressional district and he’ll give you a street-level description of its politics.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is on numerous lists of “best 20th century American novels.” Ellison never finished a second novel, but his fine writing is on display in The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callahan and Marc Conner (Random House, 2019). Ellison as a black author fought against being forced into a racial protest mode, even though there was much to protest.

Some of you will be reading this on Feb. 12, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1809. Lincoln is integral to the story I’m about to tell, but, first, some context.

Susan and I are the proud caretakers of our fourth dog, Greeley, named after famed newspaper editor Horace Greeley, whose birthday was Feb. 3, 1811. We liked our previous three dogs, but we like 5-year-old Greeley even more, so what I’m about to relate is no reflection on him: It’s a tale of cultural change.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that we lament on its Jan. 22 anniversary swept away the abortion laws of all 50 states. Those laws had not sprung up instantaneously. They were typically the product of decades of social development, discussion, and debate—and sometimes legislative wheeling and dealing as well.