For God, Family and Republic

Christmas season invokes parochial and familial sentiments...

"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar and unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy, is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead."
—George Eliot

"The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind."
—Thomas Jefferson

While I am in my parochial mindset, I recommend looking at the political treatise Politica by the German Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638). Liberty Fund publishes it. Althusius recognized the primacy of the family, the community and the principle of subsidiarity. Politica represents a break from Hobbesian political screeds that exalt centralized power which is the epicenter of life today. Sadly, the Hobbessians have the upper hand in our time, but the alienation wrought out by Leviathan — that is modern mass society with its bureaucratization and centralized power leaves people longing for something better.