My grandparents spoke of the old country from time to time when I was growing up. As a child, I didn’t fully understand what they meant — I assumed it was simply a way of distinguishing the past from the present. They still had relatives back there; some had made their way to America, but most had not. My grandparents never returned, and never wanted to. They were here, in the new world. And in those years, everything felt new. Roads were being paved, highways laid, airports built. High-rises climbed skyward alongside magnificently crafted federal buildings, and great bridges arched across rivers from coast to coast. The United States was an emerging power, and the rest of the world ... (click for more)

Unique in world history, the United States was founded not on geography, ethnicity, or a collective heritage, but on a set of shared principles – the first and most defining of which is liberty . Liberty, as the founders envisioned it, is freedom rightly ordered – not the absence of all constraint, but the rightful exercise of freedom within a moral and constitutional framework. It is grounded in natural law: the Declaration of Independence declares liberty an "unalienable right" endowed by the Creator, rooted in human nature and divine order, and therefore preceding government itself. However, because we live in community, the freedom of each person must be bounded by the equal ... (click for more)