liberalism 96
For Nancy French-ism
This is the story of a bruised soul touched by grace but still frustrated by the passivity that others continue to show in response to the unspeakable.
Travels in Exotic Nebraska: A Review of American Harvest
The book is at its best when it embraces a more generous spirit. If one wishes to learn about traveling grain harvesters and to follow a literary description of the…
Waging Culture Wars Justly
To fight a culture war justly is to be confident that your arguments have a reasonable chance of success; but this means that to fight justly is not only about…
Doppelganger: Me and George Monbiot in the Mirror World
Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is…
Rights and Duties
Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means…
Localism Not Integralism: A Review of All the Kingdoms of the World
Self-government by local communities, including some tiny confessional states, would be more consistent with ideals of diverse, self-governing communities.
Lessons on Limiting Liberty from Hannah and Burley Coulter
Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate…
Toward Philosophy of Birth? A Review of Natality
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…
Rectifying the Names: Is Conservation Liberal?
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…
Is Regime Change too Radical? Or too Conservative?
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?
On Latimer, Localism, Liberalism, and Democracy
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] 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. As…
A Christian Critique and the Neoliberal Future: A Review of Naming Neoliberalism
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…
No Justice, No Peace? René Girard and Endless Rivalries
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,…
How to Be a Liberal-Socialist-Conservative
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…
Chronicling Conservatism Rightly: A Review of The Right
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.…
Opting Out of the Outrage Machine: A Review of Bad News
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…
What Has Postliberalism to do with Jerusalem? A Review of A World After Liberalism
Henry George reviews A World After Liberalism, by Matthew Rose.
Collectivism and Violence are One
The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold?
Clearing Ground
The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can…
Before Ahmari and French, Wills and Bozell
This is awfully late but perhaps also timely (since the spat between Sohrab Ahmari and David French seems to have a long shelf life). What follows is the talk I…
Fighting Demons, Liberal and Otherwise
We like to flatter ourselves that we live in extraordinary times. Every four years, for example, we are told that this presidential election is “the most important of our life.” Those of…
Narrating the Tradition of Liberalism’s Anti-Tradition
Criticizing the current liberal order is a popular activity. Authors such as Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, D.C. Schindler, Mark Lilla, Johnathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson have generated significant conversation through…
Whose Nostalgia? Which Liberalism? Reflections on “Faith and Democracy in America”
Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.
What Kind of Democracy Do Localists Want?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Last week the United States went through another one of our regular, mostly ritualized exercises in mass democracy. What did (or should) localists think of…