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Alphabet City

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz emerged from semi-retirement to express his approval for Sarah Palin . No, I don’t propose to revisit the Sarah, pro- and con- debate, which will remain sterile and tedious until she actually, like, runs for something (or not). But I . . . . Continue Reading »

Berry Revisited

Apropos of my remarks below , a reader writes: It seems to me that you’re taking his quote about the politicization out of context, first of all. He’s downright Aristotelian, it seems to me, in his conception of what politics is. What makes me say this is the role he sees marriage . . . . Continue Reading »

The National Standards Fixation

Some policy controversies are wearying. Not because they have worn their importance down over decades spent in the argumentative rock tumbler, of course. High-stakes issues tend actually to get more portentous, over time, as we sink greater and greater emotional and intellectual investments into . . . . Continue Reading »

The Genius of Fr. Schall

Always illuminating, Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.  is a philosopher/priest who like Justin the Martyr might find wisdom in Eric Voegelin’s comment that “ . . . Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection; the history of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Sayonara, Weber!

Via Tyler Cowen, a paper by Davide Cantoni  casts some doubt on the efficacy of the Protestant Ethic: Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their . . . . Continue Reading »

The Banality Kerfuffle

I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin . . . . Continue Reading »

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