Ross Douthat

Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.

Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.

Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions.

Even conservative columnists tend to prefer humor that isn't fit to print.

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

I try not to feel too embattled. I don't think that's a healthy approach for someone who writes for a newspaper like the New York Times to take. That means, in part, that I try and avoid wallowing in things that might make me feel too embattled.

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality.

Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism - crude and polished, K.K.K. and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.

Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties' policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump's political success.

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs.

Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.