Philosophers & Saints 184

My review of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Heaven's Bride appeared in this weekend's Wall Street Journal.

Thanksgiving, which may initially seem like a practice that is all too foreign to our second nature, can become an activity that realizes our more original human nature-i.e., the nature…

And nowhere, not in so much as a page of this literature, does one discover even the beginnings of an answer to the question, “what is it like to be…

In which "culture" is distinguished from our contemporary "anti-culture."

Modern science has given us modern miracles, like iPhones and atom bombs and Chrysler cars, but has not given us the wisdom to use them.

William Gilmore Simms’ claims about the decay of morals and the arts that results from the rise of scientism and decline of supernaturalism can be elaborated by reflecting on the…

Planting a greener Green Revolution.

They have no objections to non-scientists writing on evolutionary topics, so long as they do so in the proper spirit of submissiveness and adulation.

For Wendell Berry, the environmentalist cause and the localist cause are (or should be) one and the same.

Obfuscating language and philosophical ignorance do not prevent Hawking from suggesting that modern physics confirms Christian cosmology. Nature really does conform to uncreated law.

Civilization rests upon the sacred. Thus it is as grimly appropriate that the first atom bomb test was sacrilegiously codenamed “Trinity” – as in *the* Trinity – as it is…

Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry's Great Economy.

Tradition supposedly bears the thumbprints of Roman patricians with browbeaten wives or frustrated monks who shivered in mediæval abbeys.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" provides a springboard for reflecting on the problems of scientism, especially the temptation to self-deification and, what Eric Voegelin terms, modern Gnosticism.

A scholar suggests that Phillip Blond's Red Toryism is just another word for conventional conservatism. He may be right about Blond, but he's definitely not about the idea.

Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.

The Cato Institute sponsors a symposium on Philip Blond, with a lead essay by yours truly.

If Lasch couldn't express a way for leftists and localists to speak the same language, perhaps no one can.

The Reader Objects!: If God is Personal and Loving above all, if the Christian believes reason is fundamentally preceded by what is revealed in Faith, then what grounds has the…

In the American context, one could very easily call Red Tories Jeffersonians, and this is where we see the predicament for Red Toryism in the United States.

How's that for a triple play? Andrew Bacevich reviews Eric Miller's new biography of Christopher Lasch.

Whatever the results of the British election, the Red Tory ideal remains promising...and yet, absent a robust civic religion, also probably wanting.

Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn't a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).

Benedict XVI's first social encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls…