Ivan Kenneally

As I see it, part of the problem with the approach characteristic of Deneen and company is not merely a romanticizing of halcyon days that are now surely, if not entirely, irrevocably lost and an underappreciation of its own peculiar obstacles to virtue. They also fail to take seriously . . . . Continue Reading »

President Obama just abruptly and unceremoniously put his Bioethics Council to rest and our own Peter Lawler, a member of the commission, writes its eulogy explaining the importance of its work and of the issues it addressed. While the website still exists, I encourage any and all to take a . . . . Continue Reading »

The  Summer 2009 issue of The New Atlantis is now hot off the press and I have a article entitled “Technocracy and Populism” among the mix. The New Atlantis really is one of my favortite journals, always has lots of interesting and cutting edge studies exploring the . . . . Continue Reading »

. . . is a new article written by our own Peter Lawler lucidly summarizing the reflections on dignity issued in a recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics.  The very notion of dignity is philosophically suspect today partly because it’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The latest issue of Modern Age (Winter 2009) is now available for general consumption and features a symposium on Remi Brague’s amazingly erudite book The Law of God . Besides a very fine lead contribution from Mark Shiffman (who blogs over at Front Porch Republic ) you’ll also find short . . . . Continue Reading »

It is generally accepted by both the left and the right that science itself is a morally neutral enterprise, since it merely creates the mechanisms of power that can be used for moral and immoral purposes alike. In a public speech a few years ago, President Bush expressed this commonly-held view, . . . . Continue Reading »

Another excerpt from some recent work: The basic political premise of techno-politics is that the classic question regarding competing claims to rule has been decisively answered: instead of Plato’s philosopher king we get its emasculated modern descendant, the rational bureaucrat. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Conservatives, postmodern and otherwise, often discuss the difficulties associated with the sometimes promiscuous assignment and declaration of rights in political discourse today. If we look at the American founding narrowly from the perspective of its Lockean influence, it’s easy to see the . . . . Continue Reading »

Here is a short excerpt of an aticle I just finished writing and that is relevant to Ralph’s Manifesto 1.3.1: The differences between Bush’s “Executive Order Expanding Approved Stem Cell Lines” (June 20, 2007) and Obama’s Executive Order overturning it are striking . . . . Continue Reading »

So I spent a few days this week attending a conference at Berry College in Rome, Georgia hosted by Peter Lawler and Eric Sands. It was a terrific and well organized series of events capped off by a thought provoking presentation by our own Jim Ceasar on Tocqueville, his consideration of the . . . . Continue Reading »