Hap Aziz

August 2026:Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80, and in the flood of tributes that followed, people quite rightly talked about the songs, the movies, the outrageous wigs, the one-liners, the philanthropy, and the extraordinary ability she had to make almost everyone feel as though she somehow belonged to them. Republicans loved Dolly. […]

April 2026:“Imagine” isn’t a bad song. It is a genuinely powerful piece of music. But it’s a terrible argument for crafting reality.

March 2026:To collapse those distinctions, or to apply pressure exclusively to the side attempting to restrain violence, is not an act of principled neutrality. It is a form of moral asymmetry that shapes outcomes in predictable ways, granting strategic advantage to those least constrained by ethical considerations.

March 2026:We are raising a generation in a country that can no longer disagree without trying to destroy someone.

November 2024:Trump confirmed that the country’s founding principles remain strong, regardless of a president’s personal style, ambition, or appeal to certain factions of the public.

July 2023:As a society we have let our guard down, as we have let the voices of strangers into our homes to have unfettered access to our children.

February 2023:Looking in from the outside, by many measures, my life has been a failure—an example of unrealized potential resulting from poor (or at least questionable) decisions. But the point of examining one’s own life is to reflect on the events and situations spawned from those decisions and at least try to learn some meaningful lessons from them. If the lessons are valuable, then what appeared to be failure actually may be success.

July 2022:The cultivation of wisdom requires dialogue. That can be dialogue between self and others. Or it can be dialogue between present self and past self. And that requires a bit of time travel and self-awareness.

June 2022:For nearly a decade now, there has been a growing pushback, especially among partisans from the left, against the utterance of the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” According to these voices, thoughts and prayers do not constitute appropriate action nor drive effective change.

February 2022:I never like having a conversation about language in which I come up on the wrong side of C.S. Lewis. This is going to be one of those times:  In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis writes The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called […]

August 2021:In many ways, The Unbroken Thread is a book of paradoxes, with the central paradox being that the traditions of structure and restraint are the very keys to freedom and growth for the human experience in both body and spirit.