The Pilgrim Fathers

Thursday

Ben Domenech

An errand into the wilderness

Four hundred and two years ago this month, a group of courageous Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic on a ship seasoned from years of service in the English Channel. Their ship was the Mayflower. It bore a people with characteristics — bold, daring, foolish, devout — essential to the founding of a new nation that would become the envy of the world. The year was 1620. Europe was two years into a thirty-year religious war that would raze its cities, starve its citizens, unleash plagues and take kings. They set their backs to the old ways — and bet their lives and their families on America. What started in Plymouth changed the world — and changed it for the better.

pilgrims

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why is there no great Thanksgiving movie?

In about a month’s time, one of the most boring conversations in social media discourse will begin (assuming Elon Musk hasn’t taken Twitter away from us out of pique). "X is a Christmas film." "X is not a Christmas film." And so on, as keyboard warriors angrily debate whether the eclectic likes of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Love, Actually qualify for this designation, as purists claim on endless Reddit threads that a Christmas movie can only be so-called if the plot and events are entirely driven by the festive season itself. Even for those of us who would argue that Die Hard and It’s A Wonderful Life make the perfect Christmas double bill — wider designations of the term be damned — there is considerably less debate as to what makes a Thanksgiving film.

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The exhortative tradition in America

G.K. Chesterton observed after his return to England from a lecture tour in the United States that America is a nation with the soul of a church. That is hardly surprising, the northernmost of the original thirteen colonies having been established by a fervently religious sect. All religions are exhortative by nature, none more so than the sectarian ones which have a solid history of being noisier in this respect than the established churches, partly, I suppose, because one encourages the burning of witches in louder tones than one solicits a bigger collection plate for the relief of the victims of territorial rebellion in Ethiopia. It is true that the first generation of Puritans in Massachusetts were a more dignified lot than many of their successors.

exhortation