First Things RSS Feed - Mark R. Schwehn https://www.firstthings.com/author/mark-r-schwehn en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:53:33 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/mark-r-schwehn 60 A Christian University: Defining the Difference https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/05/a-christian-university-defining-the-difference https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/05/a-christian-university-defining-the-difference Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400 The title of George Marsden’s most recent book on Christian higher education referred to the idea of Christian scholarship as “outrageous.” For many people, the idea of a Christian university is even more so. Judging by the recent resurgence of interest in and care for church-related colleges and universities of all descriptions, the idea of a Christian university is very much alive. Even so, since the 1960s, most academics have regarded serious Christian universities as Harvey Cox regarded them at that time––as medieval remnants at best and as oxymorons at worst.

Continue Reading »

]]> King Lear Beyond Reason: Love and Justice in the Family https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/10/king-lear-beyond-reason-love-and-justice-in-the-family https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/10/king-lear-beyond-reason-love-and-justice-in-the-family Fri, 01 Oct 1993 00:00:00 -0400 The practice of combining love and justice in the governance of relationships between parents and children is crucial to the moral formation of the young. This balancing act also requires the most strenuous and careful exercise by those who would be good parents of the very moral virtues that they are striving to cultivate in their offspring. Moreover, the entire endeavor hangs on one of the oldest and most perplexing of all questions, the question of whether, and how, human excellence can be taught.

Continue Reading »

]]> Alasdair MacIntyre's University https://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/05/alasdair-macintyres-university https://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/05/alasdair-macintyres-university Wed, 01 May 1991 00:00:00 -0400 Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry
by Alasdair MacIntyre
University of Notre Dame Press, 241 pages, $24.95

Continue Reading »

]]> Religion and the Life of Learning https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/08/religion-and-the-life-of-learning https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/08/religion-and-the-life-of-learning Wed, 01 Aug 1990 00:00:00 -0400 What can we know? How should we live? In what or whom should we hope? A historian might fruitfully divide Western intellectual life into periods or cultures according to which one of these three questions was the central and controlling one for them. But this imaginary (and ambitious!) historian would find that he or she could not apply this principle of organization to the time after about 1980. Something astonishing appears to have happened. For the first time in history the answers to all three questions seem, for a large number of intellectuals at least, to depend completely upon the answer to the prior question: “Who are we ?”

Continue Reading »

]]>