Therapeutic Culture

by The Editors

The First Things Podcast, Episode 19. Featuring: Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic and the 2016 season in college football. Continue Reading »

13 Dec 2016 0

Childish or Childlike? That is the real choice.

by Carl R. Trueman

Jeffrey Tayler's criticism of religion misses the real choice which Christianity and secularism represent. Continue Reading »

3 Aug 2015 0

Culture, Anti-Culture, and Lists

by James Poulos

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the . . . . Continue Reading »

16 Nov 2009 0

The Banality Kerfuffle

by James Poulos

I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin . . . . Continue Reading »

3 Nov 2009 0

Strauss, Rieff, and Tocqueville: What’s at Stake in the Fate of America Debate

by James Poulos

The collapse of sacred order in Europe during the World Wars left many of Europe’s surviving Jewish intellectuals to stake their theory and practice on the future of the United States and Israel. Communism, of course, opened its arms to secular Jews from the outset, but fascism tormented the . . . . Continue Reading »

29 Oct 2009 0

Playing With The Wild Things

by James Poulos

David Brooks tells us that Where The Wild Things Are accurately shows that, for us, the “philosopher’s” way of thinking about the good life is out and the “psychologist’s” way is in. The wild things, just as the tagline tells us, are inside us all, just one of . . . . Continue Reading »

21 Oct 2009 0

Abortion: Hamlet, Machiavelli, Obama

by James Poulos

Do read Alan Jacobs on Obama at Notre Dame. Because the clump-of-cells argument is so crude and ‘final’, Obama, putting himself at the front of a long train, seeks refuge in bad postmodernity. Rather than overdetermining the abortion question as a question of science — and this, . . . . Continue Reading »

20 May 2009 0

Pomo Bourgeois Liberalism vs. Jewish Christianity

by James Poulos

Most excellently, “Spengler” — a.k.a. David Goldman — is blogging. Even more excellently, he’s blogging on a subject near to the heart, or at least the eye, of any reader of Rieff: the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Of the Christian Robert Spaemann, . . . . Continue Reading »

24 Apr 2009 0

Affectation, Authenticity, Authority

by James Poulos

Once, our own Jim Ceaser summoned forth an evocative dialogue between Con and Pomocon . The drama hinged on how compatible were the two concerning those Three A’s — affectation, authenticity, and authority. Though their subtle advances and defenses could never be mistaken for the likes . . . . Continue Reading »

17 Apr 2009 0

Weighing In on Happiness by Talking about Suffering

by Helen Rittelmeyer

This may hurt a little. Any man, no matter who, will respond to a recording of his own voice with “Wait, I really sound like that?” That’s what I felt last week as I heard a smart young student speak in praise of suffering at an ISI lecture, for the slightly embarrassing reason that . . . . Continue Reading »

6 Nov 2008 0