First Things RSS Feed - Gertrude Himmelfarb https://www.firstthings.com/author/gertrude-himmelfarb en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:57:28 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/gertrude-himmelfarb 60 The Christian University: A Call to Counterrevolution https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/01/the-christian-university-a-call-to-counterrevolution https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/01/the-christian-university-a-call-to-counterrevolution Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500 It is well to remember, as we contemplate the relation of the university and church, that the Protestant Reformation was started by a professor in a university. Years later Luther insisted that he had never meant to be a reformer.

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]]> Tradition and Creativity in the Writing of History https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/11/tradition-and-creativity-in-the-writing-of-history https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/11/tradition-and-creativity-in-the-writing-of-history Sun, 01 Nov 1992 00:00:00 -0500 For the historian, as for the philosopher, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns is being superseded by a quarrel between the Moderns and the Postmoderns. If the great subversive principle of modernity is historicism—a form of relativism that locates the meaning of ideas and events so firmly in their historical context that history, rather than philosophy and nature, becomes the arbiter of truth—postmodernism is now confronting us with a far more subversive form of relativism, a relativism so radical, so absolute, as to be antithetical to both history and truth. For postmodernism denies not only suprahistorical truths but historical truths, truths relative to particular times and places. And that denial involves a repudiation of the historical enterprise as it has been understood and practiced until very recently.

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