I'm John Baxter, enjoying a conversation with Richard Reinsch, whose work as editor I read routinely,

and it's a pleasure to talk to the fountain of challenges.

And the challenge right now is what is to be done about the United States.

Everyone can feel it. I don't need to generalize.

We're atomized. We're driven into what some critics have said is this the world of immutable

facts. You can't change what you are when you're born. So we've turned into tribes of what you are when you're born.

There's no burden of learning or demonstration of virtue or challenge.

That's what you stay and remain.

Now, Richard, you have a list here of institutions that are vital to the country.

Nation, religion, family, military education.

Do we start in any particular one if we're going to reclaim our civic communion?

Well, I think they're all necessary. There might be needs of the human soul that cry out for more and cry out more loudly.

What's very interesting right now that's happening in our country, I'm seeing it even in my parish.

I'm Roman Catholic is people returning to the church, young men in places like New York City filling churches,

pastors being alarmed, not wondering what to make of this. That to me, and this is obviously

not going to change the country overnight, and it may not even be a huge numerical presence, but it's something.

It hasn't happened before. It seems already to flip a script that somehow inevitably religious

institutions in America, even though we are by far still the most religious country in the modern

world, except for Israel, that somehow this isn't going to be an inevitable

dissent into secularism. Another thing, it seems to me, there is a desire to have an impact

on education. And you see conservatives understanding pedagogically that these institutions, many of which

were emitting hateful ideas about our country, about our founding, we might say at best

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