Jon D. Schaff
Jon D. Schaff is professor of political science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota where he teaches courses on American politics and political thought. He is author of Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (SIU Press) and co-author of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature (Lexington Books). He lives in Aberdeen with his wife and four children.
Articles by Jon D. Schaff
The Crisis of the Self in an Age of Solutions
We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom.
Seeking the Sacred: Douthat’s Case for Religious Tradition in an Age of Uncertainty
We are pilgrims in this world. We must be content to wonder as we wander. Douthat is asking his readers to cast their nets into the deep.
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
"Is Christianity only politically efficacious in helping us determine who are our friends and who are our enemies?"
Nadya Williams and The Good News
Williams reminds us of a lesson that we should have already learned good and hard, namely that rejection of Christianity does not result in blissful liberation and self-expression.
Politics Beyond Thunderdome: Yuval Levin’s American Covenant
We cannot give into the temptation of thinking that our times are so different that basic civility must be cast aside. Once we have done that, we are lost.
I Can Hear Music
As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting…
Will No One Rid Me Of These Meddlesome -Isms: Thinking and Rethinking Liberalism
Human liberty is indeed a good. But liberty is the freedom to choose well, not just freedom from restraints.
Public Enemy #1?: Smartphones and a Generation at Risk
Haidt’s book is a tour de force. I can give it no higher praise than to say I wish we could put this book in the hands of every parent,…
Monuments to Human Stupidity? A Review of David Betz’s A Guarded Age
The film Patton contains many quotable quotes, some of which cannot be repeated on a family friendly website such as Front Porch (for example, what it might have been like…
We Could Do Worse…
Weak parties are susceptible to extreme candidates who take advantage of party weakness to run shallow, populist campaigns. These people seem fun. They appeal to our political id, mostly in…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
The Liberty to Value Common Goods: A Review of The Political Economy of Distributism
While some of Salter’s discussion here is “inside baseball” for economists, what he is trying to achieve is laudable, namely getting distributists to recognize some shortcomings in their theory while…