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 happen, and his main thesis is . . . . 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 »

Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peaceby thomas l. pangle and peter j. ahrensdorfuniversity press of kansas, 362 pages, $45 Makers of American foreign policy today are experiencing a philosophical dearth, a want of broad principles of governmental conduct in world affairs. This . . . . Continue Reading »

It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a “millennium series” of . . . . 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 to . . . . 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. . . . . 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 is . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the cornerstones of modern conservative thinking-indeed, of conservative thinking generally-is the critique of utopianism. As we all know, the critique of utopianism states, very simply, that radical efforts to improve society almost always yield evils worse than those that reformers (or . . . . Continue Reading »