First Things RSS Feed - Glenn Tinder https://www.firstthings.com/author/glenn-tinder en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:50:49 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/glenn-tinder 60 Hope and Resistance https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/10/hope-and-resistance https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/10/hope-and-resistance Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400 Hope and Resistance

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]]> Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/12/eric-voegelin-the-restoration-of-order https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/12/eric-voegelin-the-restoration-of-order Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500 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 two early works on race, and in 1938 he fled to America, where he taught for many years, mainly at Louisiana State University. He ended his professional career at the Hoover Institution and died in 1985.

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]]> To NATO from Plato https://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/02/to-nato-from-plato https://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/02/to-nato-from-plato Tue, 01 Feb 2000 00:00:00 -0500 Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace
by thomas l. pangle and peter j. ahrensdorf
university press of kansas, 362 pages, $45

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]]> Augustine Then and Now https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/05/augustine-then-and-now https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/05/augustine-then-and-now Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400 Living in Two Cities:  Augustinian Trajectories in Political Thought.
By Eugene TeSelle.
University of Scraton Press.  227 pp. $19.95

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]]> Augustine’s World and Ours https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/12/augustines-world-and-ours https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/12/augustines-world-and-ours Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 -0500 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. They are spontaneously wary of conceptual unification, and their wariness makes for divided powers and limited pretensions. In tyrannies—particularly when they are ideological and totalitarian—people tend to ignore or repudiate such dichotomies. A particular doctrine, like Marxist “science,” is affirmed as a complete and undebatable truth; the state is looked on as a spiritual order alongside which a separate church would be pointless and disruptive; public life is equated with life itself, and private life is seen as either trivial or subversive; the executive power is regarded simply as the government, with the legislature a forum for propaganda rather than deliberation. Such habits of conceptual unification make for the concentrated power and unchecked pretensions that lead to the horrors so common in these regimes.

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]]> Alone for Others https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/04/003-alone-for-others https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/04/003-alone-for-others Mon, 01 Apr 1996 00:00:00 -0500 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 having a lifelong place within a social order and contemplating the historical “narrative” that defines the social order. While all this is no doubt true, it is no less true that our humanity depends on our capacity for being alone.

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]]> At the End of Pragmatism https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/10/at-the-end-of-pragmatism https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/10/at-the-end-of-pragmatism Sun, 01 Oct 1995 00:00:00 -0400 The Promise of Pragmatism:
Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority
 By John Patrick Diggins
University of Chicago Press, 515 pages, $29.95

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