Tag: liberalism

For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own self-creation, whether that be through materializing other people in our bodies or projecting our ideas and actions onto the world.

To appeal to personal rights seems to be an appeal to the highest value, and it is no wonder that people are feeling spiritually and socially starved. No one in earlier times would have considered his rights apart from his duties and responsibilities, or her privileges apart from her obligations.

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

Wichita, KS. Trevor Latimer’s Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism deeply engaged me, but not in a positive way, at least not initially....

Clapp’s ambitious study attempts a great deal within a comparatively brief compass. Unfortunately, some topics suffer as a result...How can one best understand the tension between individual moral responsibility (rooted in Protestantism) and an individual liberty which rejects external constraints?

The rivalry we’re experiencing goes deeper than symptoms, political principles, and even the need for responsive, wise leaders. Indeed, it may bypass principles and wisdom altogether. But to explain it, I need the help of anthropologist and literary critic René Girard.

The mark by which we recognize a rightly ordered way of thinking about politics, it seems to me, is that such a way of thinking should recall us to the fact that we are, and that we receive, gifts.

Continetti’s rendition is distinctive in its focus on the tension and recurrent clashes between an increasingly radicalized populist grass roots and movement elites committed to a principled small government constitutionalism. Academic historians of the movement will be skeptical about the tidy simplicity of that portrait.

My least-favorite bumper sticker of all time reads, "If you're not outraged you're not paying attention." As a remedy for this sort of dopamine-fueled attitude, the author suggests that we refuse to bow to the media outrage machine.