Glenn Tinder

In his “I Have A Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. called on his followers to hew “a stone of hope” from “a mountain of despair.” David Chappell’s A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow is about the faith that enabled this to . . . . Continue Reading »

First, the basics: born in Germany in 1901, Eric Voegelin received a doctorate in political science from the University of Vienna, carried on several years of postdoctoral study in England, America, and France, and hem took up an academic career in Austria. He drew the hostility of the Nazis with . . . . Continue Reading »

Makers of American foreign policy today are experiencing a philosophical dearth, a want of broad principles of governmental conduct in world affairs. This is due primarily to the new power relationships created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. No longer is politics among nations structured by . . . . Continue Reading »

Our clear awareness that there are many different ways of looking at the world, and at man and his place in the world, is one of the most troubling circumstances of our time, and it is sure to endure well into, if not throughout, the third millennium of the Christian era. It is troubling simply . . . . Continue Reading »

Augustine is a thinker for all seasons and all times in the portrait that emerges from Eugene TeSelle’s Living in Two Cities . TeSelle is intimately familiar with the historical environment that Augustine inhabited and with great sensitivity examines ancient understandings of the city in order . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the most striking differences between constitutional democracies and tyrannies in our time pertains to certain habits of mind. In constitutional democracies, people tend to think in terms of dichotomies—faith and reason, church and state, public and private, executive and legislature. They . . . . Continue Reading »

Rarely, in our times, do social and political theorists praise solitude. Again and again such thoughtful writers as Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah tell us that moral rectitude, fundamental truthfulness, and all of the other virtues and skills that make us human depend upon society: upon our . . . . Continue Reading »

The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. By John Patrick Diggins. University of Chicago Press. 515 pages, $29.95 . Christianity is essentially a contemplative faith. The ultimate purpose of life is to know God, and beyond this end there is no other end. Action . . . . Continue Reading »