Our pastor recently finished a pretty good sermon, on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, with a story of his own about a dangerous curve on the highway into town.

The Parable of the Dangerous Curve brought to my mind Deborah Rhode's thorough, thoughtful assessment of American lawyers in the twenty-first century, and Dean Kronman's eulogy for the lost lawyer. The good Samaritans who sought to straighten the dangerous road spoke of roadwork as Deborah Rhode speaks of what legislatures, judges, and bar associations should do about lawyers. Maybe they thought modern speed and paving had made it dangerous—yearning, as Dean Kronman does, in his The Lost Lawyer, for a past that never was. The parable also brought to mind a critique of these sorts of idealistic assessments (my pastor's and Rhode's and Kronman's) in a series of lectures by Reinhold Niebuhr, published half a century ago under the title The Irony of American History.