Second Thoughts

 I am taking a break from regular column-writing, but I might from time to time alert readers to columns of the sort I might have written or wished I could write on topics of moment. I ran across two such columns today. The topic is immigration, the social wisdom thereof. It is a drum I […]

For no particular reason, and for every reason in the world, I thought I’d share with you something H. L. Mencken wrote almost a century that could have been–should have been — written yesterday. As democracy is perfected, the office [of the Presidency] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We […]

 I’m working on a column about the life of Springfield attorney and public citizen Logan Hay. Most of today’s Springfieldians who have heard of Logan Hay know him because his name was attached to his nobly proportioned house at South Grand Avenue. More imposing than graceful, the house was a bit of Monticello Hay had […]

I’m writing about cemeteries this week. My focus is Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, world-famous for being the final (one hopes) resting place of Lincoln and his family. But anyone who’s driven in the west suburbs of our great metropolis has probably come across Forest Park in Cook County. This is a town where cemeteries not only occupy scenic […]

 In “How high can you go?” (Nov. 16, 2017) I looked at the various proposals to lure Amazon’s proposed second national headquarters to Chicago.           The issue of economic development subsidies looms large in the debate. I’ve done my share of complaining about them. ((See “Such a deal” from Jan. 26, 2012, […]

 In Business as usual” (Nov. 9, 2017) I looked at, por rather down on, the new economic development initiative known as the Sangamon County Project. There is more to be said. The focus of the effort, as ever, is on attracting makers of goods, not sellers or movers. The obsession with manufacturing as the centerpiece […]

 In “Stellar! Stellar!”—a column lumbered with my lamest title ever—I explored the new fund drive to help build the University of Illinois’ Springfield campus. For space reasons I was unable to explore one of the hoped-for outcomes of that campaign, UIS’s plans to posthumously turn Lincoln into an adjunct faculty member by means of a […]

In the Fall 2017 number of The Hedgehog Review, which is devoted to critical reflections on contemporary culture, Paul Christman explores life in ” a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace”–the Midwestern U.S. It’s a topic I’ve touched on now and then (albeit with a more local focus, meaning the state of Illinois and its parts) […]

This was brought to my attention by the editors of the London Review of Books. It concerns something written by the influential mid-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who as every mid-Illinoisan should know was raised and partly schooled up in Lincoln.  The concluding sentence of  Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History (1952) says this: If we […]

I addressed the problem of Columbus Day in “What Columbus Day means to us.” I decided write the column after rejecting performing some symbolic act by which I might commemorate Christopher Columbus and his arrival in this hemisphere, like sending some poisoned candies to the day care center up the street. I didn’t relish the […]

 Abraham LIncoln has long engaged our historians and public intellectuals. Of late he has stimulated our artists as well.  The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious, was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which imaginatively recreates the night the grief-stricken president visited the crypt holding his beloved 11-year-old […]

 In “Gathering nuts,” I tried to pay tribute to that a string of Springfield men who played a surprising large role in the acceptance of oral history as a means of research into the past, beginning with William Herndon, Lincoln’s last law partner. When I wrote that column I was not aware that Robert P. Howard, […]