Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Culture

Books

CLEAVERS:

The Hawthornes In Paradise: Nathaniel was poor and sunk in his solitude; Sophia seemed a hopeless invalid, but a late-flower love gave them at last “a perfect Eden.” (Malcolm Cowley, December 1958, American Heritage)

Sophia Amelia Peabody, five years younger than Hawthorne, never suffered from self-absorption or an icy heart, but she had a serious trouble of lier own. A pretty rather than a beautiful woman, with innocent gray eyes set wide apart, a tiptilted nose, and a mischievous smile, she had beaux attending her whenever she appeared in society; the trouble was that she could seldom appear. When Sophia was fifteen, she had begun to suffer from violent headaches. Her possessive mother explained to her that suffering was woman’s peculiar lot, having something to do with the sin of Eve. Her ineffectual father had her treated by half the doctors in Boston, who prescribed, among other remedies, laudanum, mercury, arsenic, hyoscyamus, homeopathy, and hypnotism, but still the headaches continued. Once as a desperate expedient she was sent to Cuba, where she spent two happy years on a plantation while her quiet sister Mary tutored the planter’s children. Now, back in Salem with the family—where her headaches were always worse—she was spending half of each day in bed. Like all the Peabody women, she had a New England conscience and a firm belief in the True, the Beautiful, and the Transcendental. She also had a limited but genuine talent for painting. When she was strong enough, she worked hard at copying pictures—and the copies sold- or at painting romantic landscapes of her own.


Sophia had been cast by her family in a role from which it seemed unlikely that she would ever escape. Just as Elizabeth Peabody was the intellectual sister, already famous as an educational reformer, and Mary was the quiet sister who did most of the household chores, Sophia was the invalid sister, petted like a child and kept in an upstairs room. There were also three brothers, one of them married, but the Peabodys were a matriarchy and a sorority; nobody paid much attention to the Peabody men. It was written that when the mother died, Sophia would become the invalid aunt of her brother’s children; she would support herself by painting lampshades and firescreens, while enduring her headaches with a brave smile. As for Hawthorne, his fate was written too; he would become the cranky New England bachelor, living in solitude and writing more and more nebulous stories about other lonely souls. But they saved each other, those two unhappy children. Each was the other’s refuge, and they groped their way into each other’s arms, where both found strength to face the world.

Books Puritan Nation Republican Liberty

PEOPLE OF THE ARC:

Is Grit the American Virtue? (Phillip M. Pinell, 2/12/26, Ford Forum Observer)

For Mattie, grit means follow-through. It is the ability to do one’s job—however brutal—without flinching. Rooster’s violence is not admirable to her in itself, but it is evidence that he will persevere. Even this God-fearing young Presbyterian, no friend of vice, concludes that moral squeamishness is not a prerequisite for justice. Her father has been murdered. Justice requires the murderer be caught and hanged. Nothing more, nothing less. This is an Old Testament conception of justice, not as mercy to one’s enemy, but as measure-for-measure.

Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Mattie possesses more grit than the man she hires. Despite Rooster’s attempts to leave her behind, she follows him into dangerous, unfamiliar terrain. She eats little, sleeps less, and refuses every opportunity to give up. Unlike Rooster, who is motivated by money, Mattie is animated by a righteous sense of duty. Her upbringing has made her the opposite of Rooster: law-abiding, methodical, stubbornly principled. And yet she, not Rooster, ultimately kills Chaney with her father’s own rifle.

This tension—between the lawless grit of Rooster and the principled grit of Mattie—captures something fundamental about the American character as imagined in our national mythology. If America is shaped by the dispositions of those who came before, Mattie embodies the perseverance of early American settlers and frontier families, the relentless Protestant insistence that injustice must be confronted directly, that one must not shrink from doing hard things oneself. Her world is set fifty years after Tocqueville’s travels, yet she would not look out of place in his account of the determined, self-reliant Americans of Jacksonian America.

The Western endures because it dramatizes this dual nature of American grit. Sometimes it manifests as admirable perseverance, sometimes as dangerous vigilante hardness. But it is unmistakably American in its insistence that adversity is not an excuse to retreat.

Immigration

A LEGACY OF RACISM:

Trade, Immigration, and the Forces of Political Culture: America was founded as a “society of equals.” Technological or demographic changes that threaten that ideal have long provoked sharp political responses. (Stephen Haber, February 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

It was not long before another technological change—the fall in transport costs induced by improvements in passenger steamships—created a new challenge to America’s society of equals. Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, and Japan, who would work for wages well below those of native-born workers, began arriving in large numbers.

The political response to technologically induced demographic change was sharp.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese already in the United States the right to become naturalized citizens. In 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in California to expand the Chinese Exclusion Act to immigrants from those countries. The result was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for Japanese citizens wishing to work in the United States.

Restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration soon followed. A 1917 law required immigrants to pass a literacy test. In 1921 an Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants from any country outside the Western Hemisphere to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons of that nationality living in the United States in 1910. It therefore sharply curtailed what had been virtually unlimited European immigration and at the same time favored Northern and Western Europeans, who were numerically dominant in the United States in the 1910 census, over poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

It was followed by the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000, and set quotas for Europeans at 2 percent of their US population in the 1890 census (when Eastern and Southern Europeans were an even smaller minority than in the 1910 census, thereby further curtailing their numbers).

America’s restrictive immigration policies endured for decades. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained on the books until 1943, when the United States and China were allied against Japan during World War II. The quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act remained until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which established a preference system based on attracting highly skilled workers and reunifying families.

Immigration

I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF:

A Theology of Immigration: “None of us have a permanent residence here in this world,” the Reverend Dan Groody says. (Jay Caspian Kang, February 3, 2026, The New Yorker)

These thoughts and the current battle over immigration brought me to the work of the Reverend Dan Groody, a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Notre Dame, who spent years working in Latin America. In 2009, Groody published a paper titled “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” in which he grappled with Imago Dei, the idea found throughout the Bible that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. “On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse,” Groody writes. “Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members.”

Last week, I talked with the activist Wayne Hsiung about some of the practical assets—physical infrastructure, collective belief—that religious communities bring to progressive activism. The point Hsiung made was that we cannot actually build movements without institutional support, which, at least in this country, still has to come from faith. My conversation with Groody was more philosophical, focussed on how we think, in the most foundational way, about other people, and how essential this is to political change. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

the Reverend Dan Groody: I knew instinctively, as a pastor, that something of God was interwoven in their stories. And as I began to look even more closely to the Scriptures and other places, I recognized that Jesus himself was a migrant. Jesus himself was a refugee. In fact, I use this almost as the organizing understanding of God, who migrated to our human race, who in turn reconciled us to God, so that we can migrate back to our homeland and become naturalized citizens again in God’s kingdom, if you will. So there’s a way in which migration frames and can frame the whole understanding of the Scriptures from beginning to end. We come from God. We’re called to return to God. Migration is a metaphor that can be used to understand what it means to be human in this world. If that be the case, none of us are fixed or stayed and none of us have a permanent residence here in this world.

CROSSING THE DIVIDE: FOUNDATIONS OF A THEOLOGY OF MIGRATION AND REFUGEES (DANIEL G. GROODY, C.S.C., 2009, Theological Studies)

In the book of Genesis we are introduced to a central truth that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27; 5:1–3; 9:6; 1 Cor 11:7; Jas 3:9). This is not just another label but a way of speaking profoundly about human nature. Defining all human beings in terms of imago Dei provides a very different starting point for the discourse on migration and creates a very different trajectory for the discussion. Imago Dei names the personal and relational nature of human existence and the mystery that human life cannot be understood apart from of the mystery of God.

Lisa Sowle Cahill notes that the image of God is “the primary Christian category or symbol of interpretation of personal value.”21 “[This] symbol,” Mary Catherine Hilkert adds, “grounds further claims to human rights” and “gives rise to justice.”22 One reason why it is better to speak in terms of irregular migration rather than “illegal aliens” is that the word alien is dehumanizing and obfuscates the imago Dei in those who are forcibly uprooted. On the surface it may seem basic to ground a theology of migration on imago Dei, but the term is often ignored in public discourse. Defining the migrant and refugee first and foremost in terms of imago Dei roots such persons in the world very differently than if they are principally defined as social and political problems or as illegal aliens; the theological terms include a set of moral demands as well. Without adequate consideration of the humanity of the migrant, it is impossible to construct just policies ordered to the common good and to the benefit of society’s weakest members. The fact that in our current global economy it is easier for a coffee bean to cross borders than those who cultivate it raises serious questions about how our economy is structured and ordered.

Sex

DEPROGRAMMING THE CULT:

Plastic surgeons ditch gender ideology (Benjamin Ryan, 4 Feb 2026, UnHerd)

On Tuesday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out in opposition to providing gender-transition surgeries to minors. The recommendation, the first of its kind from a mainstream medical association, was published in a nine-page policy statement that marks a watershed moment in these debates. It’s part of a broader rethink among many experts, a reminder that science can trump ideology when investigators follow time-tested, evidence-based processes.

Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The Comic Faith of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coby Dolloff, 2/02/26, Christ and Pop Culture)

Returning to Everett’s farm, not to find the treasure they sought, but to retrieve his wedding ring, they are met by the bespectacled lawman who has dogged their trail all along. He has prepared nooses, graves—and even a haunting troupe of gravedigging singers.

“But we’s been pardoned! They announced it on the radio!” the three protest. The policeman replies with haunting simplicity: “We don’t have a radio.”

Faced with the impending reality of death, Everett puts up an earnest prayer for salvation. There are no atheists in foxholes.

And, like clockwork, the deus ex-es the machina. Floodwaters come streaming down that engulf both the just and the unjust in a torrent of household furniture and Dapper Dan pomade. Safely afloat a coffin Moby-Dick style, Delmar attempts to point out to Everett that his prayer worked.

But on the other side of peril, Everett is back to rationalizing. The valley was, of course, already scheduled to be flooded by local bureaucrats. It is not God, but modern technology that has saved them. Everett smugly concludes, “Yessir, we’re gonna have us a veritable age of reason.” But then something floats by which leaves both protagonist and viewer with the furrowed brow of recall.

The other cow just dropped. Memory has spoken. It has all come to pass, just as the old prophet Tiresias predicted.

The Coens’ comic masterpiece fits comfortably into the “Christ-haunted American South” of Flannery O’Connor. It muses, alongside Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”

Identitarianism Immigration

CALVIN COOLIDGE WAS NOT CONSERVATIVE:

What Trump Is Forgetting: American Nations Have a Long History of Open Borders (Daniel Mendiola, 1/27/26, The Guardian)

In the US, open borders were more of a default policy born out of the absence of legal restrictions, but this was still the case for nearly the first 150 years the country’s existence. Immigrants were by default presumed admissible, and the federal government did not implement immigration restrictions at all until until the late 19th century when it singled out Chinese immigrants for exclusion, though borders remained open otherwise, and even many Chinese were able to evade these laws by naturalizing in other countries first, such as Mexico. It was not until the 1920s that federal lawmakers experimented with a fully closed-border system (defined as a system in which any immigrant is presumed inadmissible until they demonstrate that they fit into one of the restricted, previously defined categories that would make one admissible and have that admissibility officially recognized by the state). This was a massive expansion of federal powers, and under this clunky new system, some decades saw heavier enforcement than others – especially for racialized groups such as Mexicans and Haitians – even as late as the 1980s, closed borders were flexible enough that a large-scale amnesty program could pass with relatively little controversy.

Film/TV

THE ONE STORY:

Where the Frontier Meets the Galaxy: The Western Genre and the Moral Imagination of Star Wars (Cole Burgett, 1/21/26, Christ and Pop Culture)

But more than set dressing, it’s the moral architecture of the Western that gives Star Wars its discernable spine. The best Westerns understand that wide open spaces don’t make life simpler. On the frontier, there’s nowhere to hide who you really are. A man’s character isn’t protected by institutions or excuses. Instead, it’s revealed whenever trouble rides into town. A rancher who refuses to bend to corruption, a gunman who finally hangs up his weapon, a sheriff who stands his ground when the rest of the town scatters—these traits define them more than the outcome of any gunfight or duel ever could.

Likewise, Star Wars is filled with moral clarity born from the same crucible. Han Solo stands right where the Western and the space opera overlap. He begins the classic wandering gun-hand, cut from the same cloth as L’Amour’s Lance Kilkenny or Hondo Lane, self-reliant, suspicious, interested only in profit. He’ll draw his blaster in a heartbeat. He shoots first. He’s the man who insists he “ain’t in this for your revolution.” But like so many of L’Amour’s protagonists, Han is not morally static. Western heroes often start self-serving but become protectors when faced with injustice that threatens people they’ve come to care about. Han’s arc sees him become something even more recognizably Western: a good man forged in a bad land.

Books Identitarianism

AN ALIEN ATE MY HOMEWORK:

Erich von Däniken and the modern paranoid style: His archeological esoterica fuelled the development of modern conspiracy theory (James Snell, 1/18/26, The Critic)

Some readers will remember Däniken. They may still, if they look hard enough, find his ageing paperbacks in cardboard boxes in their attic — foremost among them his bestseller Chariots of the Gods? To those for whom Däniken’s name does not ring any bells, I heartily recommend this book. If you read it, you’ll begin to see Däniken’s influence everywhere — in much popular discussion of his favoured subject (archaeology) and broader, more widely across the modern internet and social media.

What Däniken sold was a suite of theories and a series of bold, grand narratives about the human past. The history of the ancient world, he said, was wrong and false. It had to be rewritten. Instead of the archaeological evidence we have and the conclusions drawn by scholars, Däniken argued that instead, there were two clear things academics and gatekeepers ignored: evidence of aliens, and evidence of what was almost supernatural.

Däniken posited that all ancient societies were linked by something beyond human understanding. Their mysteries and achievements, like the pyramids of Giza, were the product of cooperation with, or rule by, godlike beings that came from the stars.

If someone/something else is not in control of your life you have to accept personal responsibility for what you’ve made of it. the root of all conspiracies is the attempt to avoid this accountability.

Music

DEMOTICS ARE US:

Weep, Shudder, Die: Can Opera Talk? (Dana Gioia, December 16, 2025, Church Life Journal)

The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.

The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.

The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?

Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.

No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.

There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung

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