Dear Readers,

With the end of the year soon upon us, it is time once again to think about making a tax-deductible gift to FPR. Your donations are used to help maintain the excellent content to which you’ve become accustomed, to help expand our “stable” of authors, to run the annual conference, and to  make improvements to the FPR website. It is not easy to run a website such as this one: while many of us work on a volunteer basis, there are many expenses involved with running a site such as this one. It would not be possible without the generosity of many of our readers.

In 2015 we plan on a new, more user-friendly, design for FPR, one with more and easier search capabilities. My goal is to make sure there is at least one new column up every day of the week, but to do this requires a certain amount of incentivizing of our authors.

You can donate by clicking on the paypal link found on this page, or by sending a check to: Jeff Polet, Treasurer FPR, Department of Political Science, Hope College, Holland MI, 49423

All donations are tax deductible. I will send all donors a receipt for their donations.

Thank you for considering this. Some readers have already donated this year, and for that we are deeply grateful.

Local Culture
Local Culture
Local Culture
Local Culture
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Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet grew up in an immigrant household in the immigrant town of Holland MI. After twenty years of academic wandering he returned to Holland and now teaches political science at Hope College, where he also grudgingly serves as chair of the department, having unsuccessfully evaded all requests. In the interim, he continues to nurture quirky beliefs: Division III basketball is both athletically and morally superior to Division I; the Hope/Calvin rivalry is the greatest in sports; the lecture is still the best form of classroom instruction; never buy a car with less than 100,000 miles on it; putts will still lip out in heaven; bears are the incarnation of evil; Athens actually has something to do with Jerusalem; and Tombstone is a cinematic classic. His academic work has mirrored his peripatetic career. Originally trained at the Catholic University of America in German philosophy and hermeneutical theory, he has since gravitated to American Political Thought. He still occasionally writes about European thinkers such as Michel Foucault or the great Max Weber, but mostly is interested in the relationship between theological reflection and political formation in the American context. In the process of working on a book on John Marshall for The Johns Hopkins University Press, he became more sensitive to the ways in which centralized decision-making undid local communities and autonomy. He has also written on figures such as William James and the unjustly neglected Swedish novelist Paer Lagerkvist. A knee injury and arthritis eliminated daily basketball playing, and he now spends his excess energy annoying his saintly wife and their three children, two of whom are off to college. Expressions of sympathy for the one who remains can be posted in the comments section. He doesn’t care too much for movies, but thinks opera is indeed the Gesamtkuntswerk, that the music of Gustav Mahler is as close as human beings get to expressing the ineffable, that God listens to Mozart in his spare time, and that Bach is history’s greatest genius.