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
Are Americans Better Off?
Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that…
Combatting the Christmas-Industrial-Complex
One can have a very merry Christmas with great simplicity. And maybe, thinking of charity toward our less fortunate neighbors, modeling simplicity has its virtues.
How Shall We Train Up A Child?: The View From One State
All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train…
From Endoscopy to Colonoscopy: One Man’s Strange and Confounding Journey Through American Health Care
Beneath these critiques of the American medical system and the biological mysteries of the human body throbs a more existential question: How does one deal with suffering? These are some…
The Face of Education
As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term…
Breaking our Concentration: Lessons from Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln on Local Economies
Lincoln wishes to promote Jeffersonian virtues by Hamiltonian means. In a Jeffersonian vein, Lincoln wants to encourage small, independent operations that free people from dependence on “the man.”
The Battle Rages On: Eric Adler’s Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
We all want students to think critically and to reflect on what they have encountered in the course of their education. In order to do that, however, they must have…
Joel Kotkin on American Neo-Feudalism
There needs to be a concentration of the real: skills training, middle class and upwardly mobile working class jobs. Replace symbolism with real improvements.
The Death of a Justice and the Hope of Magnanimous Statesmanship
We do not need reminding of how bitter, partisan, and polarized American politics is today. In order to have a community, people need to hold some things in common. America…
Not Throwing Away My Shot: Alexander Hamilton and the Militarization of the American Police
Like the “good men” that Lincoln noted will give up on free government in the wake of mob rule, Hamilton warns that those who fear their rights are threatened will…
Calling For A 21st-Century Magna Carta: A Review of Joel Kotkin’s The Coming Neo-Feudalism
The global middle class of Kotkin’s subtitle must unite with the working class for a new Magna Carta for the 21st Century, one that will, in Lincoln’s words, make us…
In Our Memory Lock’d: Memorial Day and the Need to Remember
One of the arts of statesmanship is the use of language, of rhetoric, to reshape the architecture of people’s souls and orient them towards political truths.