Place. Limits. Liberty.
Join us for FPR’s 2025 Conference on “Work and Leisure”

Jeff Polet

Treasurer
Jeff 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.

Articles by Jeff Polet

Money Grab

Three principles. The first is Stein's Law: if something can't go on forever, it won't. The second is that governing is ruled by the law of unintended consequences. The third…
Jeff Polet
August 8, 2013

Farewell to Port Clinton

Apropos this year's FPR Conference comes this Times story from Robert Putnam, who laments the decline of his hometown of Port Clinton, OH. The weakening of unions, vacating of the manufacturing…
Jeff Polet
August 7, 2013

I Would Not, Could Not, With a Cat

I've recently written about the travails of the UCC in Canada. From Rod Dreher's blog comes this video of a service down the street from Kilsyth in the city of…
Jeff Polet
July 30, 2013

The Big Firm

My oldest daughter recently graduated from college, where she has long considered a career in law. I have (at least) two persons I know well who have pursued legal careers:…
Jeff Polet
July 25, 2013

The Fate of the Rural Church?

Kilsyth, Ontario  Darryl Hart wrote some time ago about the unwillingness of mainline Protestants to serve in rural churches. Employing Wendell Berry, Hart wrote: In his essay, “God and Country,”…
Jeff Polet
July 24, 2013

2013 Academy of Philosophy and Letters Conference

The Academy of Philosophy and Letters will have its annual conference in Baltimore on June 7-9 on the theme "Cheerfulness Keeps Breaking In: Light in the Darkness." Sharp readers will…
Jeff Polet
May 16, 2013

Dodd-Frank Follies

When things go wrong we generally ask "What can we do to keep that from happening again"? It's a normal human reaction, but a prideful one. Those of us who…
Jeff Polet
May 3, 2013

Bigger is Better

Comes the report from the Grey Lady that the Fed's habit of pumping obscene amounts of money into the economy has the effect of increasing the profits of large companies…
Jeff Polet
April 16, 2013

Capital Offense

Washington, DC I’ve been spending my semester in exile in our nation’s capital. My apartment is in Arlington, on a ridge overlooking the city. From that spot I have a…
Jeff Polet
April 14, 2013

…And Marry Young.

Mark Mitchell has recently posted about marrying young. This becomes a topic of conversation, of course, when no one is doing it. I find in my conversations with students that…
Jeff Polet
April 2, 2013

Time To Stop Hooking Up

Donna Freitas writes in The Washington Post about the sorrows, travails, and confusions of the hook-up culture (if it can be called such). I am reminded when reading her article…
Jeff Polet
April 2, 2013

Piers Sits Ryan in the Corner

Ryan Anderson may be the most courageous person in America. Who would willingly place himself in the company of Piers Morgan and Suze Orman for the sole purpose of being…
Jeff Polet
March 28, 2013