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The Boy Scouts and Neuhaus’ Law

The joyful anticipation of a fresh conquest is palpable on the front page of today’s New York Times : ” In a Quick Shift, Scouts Rethink a Ban on Gays .” That’s right, at its national executive board meeting next week, the Boy Scouts of America will consider eliminating . . . . Continue Reading »

First Links — 1.29.13

An Unrecognizable America Carson Holloway, Public Discourse The Possibility of Progress Jeremy Kessler, New Atlantis Pride and Prejudice at 200 Heather Horn, Atlantic In Defense of Church-Hopping Michelle Van Loon, Her.menutics St. Gregory Nazianzen as Confessional Theologian Eclectic Orthodoxy . . . . Continue Reading »

The Redemption of Nathan Leopold, Maybe

Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from Chicago’s wealthy German Jewish elite, and they read too much Nietzsche and started thinking they were supermen. Loeb, the . . . . Continue Reading »

How to Expand Your Vocabulary

Quick: Define nugatory, macerate, and ferrous, and use each in a sentence. A bit rusty on your vocabulary? You may want to brush up—-and make sure your kids do, too. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. writes in City Journal: There’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size . . . . Continue Reading »

Ivan the K Has His Say on West’s Locke

I have received a good number of emails on Tom West’s friendly criticism of our dogmatically Straussian Locke. Here’s one from our friend Ivan Kenneally: The thread on Locke is a provocative one. I think West is half right—the absence of any epistemological access to natural . . . . Continue Reading »

Religious Vision—Liberal Blindness

I’m a Christian intellectual. (I hope that’s true, on both counts). I have a PhD in theology. That’s what I know best. I participate in the Christian form of life, or at least I try to. It provides me with my most basic intellectual tools. This Christian way of thinking is not . . . . Continue Reading »

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