Posts classified under: Religion and Politics

The Church of Woke is not just another righteous uprising in American Reform. Its mission, like fourth-century Christianity, is existential change.

Much of modern psychology is based on discoveries made by psychiatrists and psychotherapists while observing their patients. But this is not the first time in history that a large group of professionals has been able to investigate the inner functioning of the human mind.

Numerous jeremiads today about American higher education demonstrate a disinclination to examine their subject in a broad historical perspective. Thus many such works seldom cast their purview earlier than the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and see these decades as the years that inaugurated the push to treat higher education as a business.

James Matthew Wilson wants to overcome the opposition of mythos and logos. This involves going back to Plato, who is often read as setting up this opposition.

In the collection of writings published under the title Wilderness in America, David Rodick goes a long way toward filling out the arc of Henry G. Bugbee’s life and career.

Whatever the merit of the claim that America can be called a Christian nation, this much is for sure: Americans are fish swimming in a civil religion that is not the same as Christianity.

Diversity is par for human existence after Eden. Differences and pluralism are everywhere apparent even in the history of salvation.

The promotion of faith from its traditional subordination to charity led to the virtual destruction of solidarity. Had more Christians lived genuinely Christian lives, things might have been different.

Augustinian Christianity is unable to sustain its own posture of radical transcendence. That position is so harsh, so immoderate, and so inhuman that it leads its advocates to succumb to an extremism of another kind.

An anti-traditionalist intelligentsia and government, it may be argued, continue to undermine America’s traditional civilization and regime.

This article focuses on the relevance of early Christian writings on acedia and tristitia to the primary modern and postmodern maladies of the subject, i.e., chronic ennui, alienation, estrangement, disenchantment, angst, neurosis, etc.

Although most people do not consciously accept postmodernist doctrines, these doctrines may still reflect the working assumptions that most of us live by but refuse to acknowledge.

This book provides a good example of the distortion of reality, not to mention mind-torturing confusion, that occurs when political documents are viewed through sectarian glasses.

I contend that Žižek does not deliver the insights that he repeatedly promises. I propose to subject one of his works Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? to close examination.

The relationship between tradition and modernity has been a central theme of postcolonial African philosophy. While African philosophers have examined this theme from many angles, several basic questions have become the focus of ongoing debate and discussion: What is the relevance of indigenous African traditions to the challenges of contemporary life?

Ultimately, it is this reverence, this humility before God, and this faith in the goodness of life that are at the heart of Panichas’s long and productive career, and that also underlie the sort of conservatism that he has defended so admirably over the course of the past four decades.

What separates Voegelin from most modern philosophers is not so much a difference of intellect as a difference of imagination.

Mill muddied the waters of classical-liberal philosophy by his conviction that the end of government is the “improvement of mankind” and not the preservation of individual liberty.

Why did all the leading thinkers feel compelled to take sides or make personal statements? The issue involved the status of Enlightenment reason itself.

Kramnick and Moore accept that anyone who finds anything positive to say about Christian teaching is a Christian. The architect of the “Jefferson Bible” has as much claim to speak for Christianity as anyone else.

It is not the mere division of tasks that results in the collective good—there is no “invisible hand” in John’s functionalism.

Why did Marx so move the world? Did he shed new light on the human story, plumb its mysteries to previously unsounded depths?

Newman has been increasingly associated with the theological liberalism he often disavowed.

On the most general level, then, his response to modernity is not unlike many others in the post-War period: a rediscovery of some form of personal moral anchor, in opposition to the surrounding sources of disorder, as a way out of the nihilism of the twentieth century.

Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously problematic.

Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity.

Augustine’s thought has ever held a deep attraction for the Western mind and has, of course, profoundly shaped the moral traditions that inform Western political culture.

Americans fulfilled the promise of their Revolution by establishing the Constitution, its written form intended to enshrine the moral values held by the people based on their religion.

Yet while the "southern mode of the imagination" in Tate's work has received extensive scrutiny, the Catholic mode of imagination in his writings has been left largely to conjecture.

Praise of contemplation and speculation does not constitute a refutation of positivism.

The uncritical view of our sixteenth President as a pious statesman has been extraordinarily influential. It has affected the most incisive minds.

Gray’s essential argument is for a regrounding of human social experience in history and nature. If we want to live in a society that is even minimally civilized, there is simply no room for growth without end and ever-more-expansive rights doctrines.

To examine the role of humility in contemporary society, we must look in unexplored places. The best sellers of our time rarely deal directly with theological or moral issues.

Aristotle once said that “all men desire to know.” In modern philosophy, however, this “desire” has been ignored, and concern for this fundamental human experience has been replaced by a concern for epistemological consistency.

Russell Kirk had a distinctive, engaging literary style, and he was accessible not just to academic specialists. He was a man of ideas rather than a technical philosopher.

As Mill proceeds in On Liberty, he seems to take away a good deal of what he “gives” at the beginning.

His noetic mysticism makes him better equipped to transcend the ideological deformations of modernity and the Islamic world. Yet his mysticism is ultimately solitary, making it insufficient to accomplish its task.

In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor is both guide and traveling companion on a long, rewarding journey through the history of Western philosophy.

St. Augustine and Karl Jaspers wrote about humanity as a whole, humankind, the human race—not only everyone around the world, but throughout time, the past and the future, in one shared purpose.

Of the statesman's charge, More in Utopia says: "What you cannot turn to the good, you must at least make as little bad as you can."

We live in a postmodern spiritual wasteland created by an impenetrable wall of separation between the City of God and the City of Man.

Tate argued against both censorship by Catholic authorities and what he termed the literary "angelic imagination," advocating instead the Dantesque "symbolic imagination."

Reflection on the Old Testament diplomatic traditions could provide the starting point for a return to a more sober foreign policy.

This "most readable" of medieval authors was fascinated by execution. Why?

It is good to see that Burke is being systematically studied. O’Brien gives his reader a broad overview of how Burke pursued his causes in Parliament and in his writing.

While applauding these Babbittian ideas, I have argued in various places that Babbitt unduly discounts reason’s contribution to the search for reality.

According to this “new thinking” about literary theft, plagiarism must go the way of other taboos that have been modified and redefined in deference to sensitivity and social progress...

Paul Gottfried, in his revised and expanded edition of The Conservative Movement, expresses a similar short term pessimism about political and cultural developments in the United States.

According to Lewis scholar Alister McGrath, “From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”

Esau grew to be a “natural man,” a man of the field and the hunt, an “elder” or more primitive image of humankind, while Jacob grew to be a “smooth” civilized man, a logo-centric man of the tent, or the polis.

Burke never reconciled himself to the French Revolution; but he also held no great hope that the sweeping historical changes that it ushered in could be reversed, at least in the short run.

As in his previous work, Gottfried is critical of the neoconservative project. Gottfried attributes the neoconservatives’ success mostly to their relentless self-promotion and what in the business world is called cross-selling, massive fundraising efforts, and their close ideological (and, in some cases, personal) connections with the liberal establishment.

The Medieval understanding of theology and politics, rooted in Exodus, exceeds the limiting categories Carl Schmitt provides.

Even if the Founders had been lucidly clear about the moral and philosophical foundations of the First Amendment, it is in a sense futile to argue from their authority.