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Generation Hobbes

One drawback of Leviathan is that Hobbes, the great theorist of the individual, doesn’t theorize the kind of individual that emerges in real life in the wake of, say, Napoleon. (This is a kind of individual different yet from the one we associate with the Revolution itself.) Already within . . . . Continue Reading »

Summer Reading Redux

Well, that was June. This is July.Read-aloud for the 5- and 6-year-olds: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, in a volume with all the stories.The 11-year-old: Is currently rereading, for the zillionth time, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, in a cheesy-looking (photos from the films on the . . . . Continue Reading »

On My Summer Vacation, I . . .

. . . did not go to the beach. Instead, I googled the phrase religious beach, and here are some of the things the search turned up: Dollar-Stretching Luau Deals like this inflatable beach ball. They didn’t have a picture of the un-inflatable kind. Information regarding religious beaches in Tel . . . . Continue Reading »

The Man Show

Be sure to tune in tonight to catch my friend and friend of this site Matthew B. Crawford on the Colbert Report . He’ll be talking about surly men, the need for speed, and his great book, Shop Class as Soulcraft . Hopefully he’ll also refer to himself as “the anti-Michael . . . . Continue Reading »

Summer Reading in the House of Curiosities

Not that all of this is either explicitly religious or — any of it — kitschy; it’s just what there is to write about today, while I wait for the next person to send in some oddity or other. The Five- and Six-Year-Olds (who get read aloud to together): Secret Water by Arthur . . . . Continue Reading »

Balzac, of all things

Here are a couple of excerpts from a brilliant decoding of Balzac’s esotericism, accomplished by Scott Sprenger, a colleague of mine at BYU. Consider the applications to the analysis of Straussianism, and to a post-Straussian postmodern critique of modernity: The fundamental problem that . . . . Continue Reading »

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