Love is blind, we like to say. John says the opposite. John teaches that we need to test and discern and judge the spirits and prophets. Discernment means keeping your eyes open. Discernment means not believing everything that you hear, not jumping on every bandwagon that passes through town, not . . . . Continue Reading »
When Frederick the Elector of Saxony protected Luther from church and imperial authorities, it was not as a personal friend but to protect the rights of the university faculty to exercise censorship in religious matters. The Reformation thus planted the seeds for the exaltation of the university . . . . Continue Reading »
In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society. England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Hobbes called it a “circular motion of the sovereign power,” but what he actually described in summarizing the Revolutionary-Restoration sequence was a chiasm: “it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and . . . . Continue Reading »
The House of Commons, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, is a body, not a collection of individual units. MPs do not have, as US Representatives and Senators do, individual desks; there is only one table in Commons. And up to the time that Rosenstock-Huessy was writing, MPs were never addressed by name in . . . . Continue Reading »
Cromwell and his co-belligerents claimed to be aiming for the restoration of English liberties; they did not consider themselves rebels. Yet, in much English historiography, the Puritan Revolution goes down as the “Great Rebellion,” the term “restoration” having been snagged . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenstock-Huessy points out the contrast between French and English attitudes toward “old” things. Quoting on Boutmy, he says, “’ Ancien regime or ‘old France’ is objectionable in France; ‘Old England’ is a eulogy.” He adds, “To have a . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Roth, Everyman . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 182 pp. Paperback, $13.00. When Death comes to fetch him in the medieval morality play, Everyman is abandoned by Friends, Kin, Beauty, and Goods. At least Good Works, purified through penance, accompanies him and gives access to heaven. Philip . . . . Continue Reading »
When the constitutional treaty for the European Union deleted references to Europe’s Christian heritage, many quite rightly protested this remarkable act of self-induced amnesia. But it was really old news. From the time of the French Revolution, “Europe” was redefined, first in . . . . Continue Reading »
Jefferson claimed that “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.” But this “us” is a very narrow slice of the human race. As Rosenstock-Huessy says, “The obvious weakness of the new-born child, of the old man, of the dependent servant, of the ill or . . . . Continue Reading »
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