We learned last night that Timothy Geithner was confirmed as the Obama administration’s Secretary of the Treasury. While this outcome was never in real doubt, the revelation that he had failed to report upwards of $26,000 in self-employment taxes when he was an overseas employee of the . . . . Continue Reading »
When I suggested on this blog that “all politics is tribal,” Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Larison, and Andrew Sullivan all slapped me down like I’d talked about their mothers. Which I suppose, in a way, I had. Their argument was that, by comparing politics to family, I had . . . . Continue Reading »
Mr. Deneen’s take (post just before this one) on the Inaugural is the most penetrating I’ve seen, or expect to see. The collusion between Kantianism and Machiavellianism is a very important insight, and in fact one that Harvey Mansfield has always seen very clearly (as in his “Moral Reasoning . . . . Continue Reading »
Not to revisit a debate that, by internet standards, is now ancient history having taken place as a result of my posting last week in criticism of the modern conservative commitment to profoundly anti-conservative philosophy of liberalism but looking over what Peter wrote and others . . . . Continue Reading »
The great contest is over the culture, the guiding ideas and habits of mind and heart that inform the way we understand the world and our place in it. Christians who, knowingly or unknowingly, embrace the model of “Christ without culture”—meaning Christianity in indifference to culture—are . . . . Continue Reading »
My name has appeared on the masthead now for almost two months, but i have hesitated to pen an inaugural entry, especially since, unlike some of the others in the group, i have no full-fledged manifesto to announce. And as these things go the longer one waits, the more difficult it . . . . Continue Reading »
Matt Crawford ably explains how college campuses have become incubators of schoolmarmish therapeutic supervision. No longer confident in the mission of higher education and therefore too hobbled to resist becoming an adjunct of popular society versus an engine of . . . . Continue Reading »
Genuine diversity depends, of course, on lives formed by different understandings of the self or soul. Our tradition of diversity has been largely of diverse religious communities. Now we talk so much about diversity because we’re anxiously aware that we’re losing it. Diversity has largely been . . . . Continue Reading »
People are basically good, right? It’s a truism drilled into us by any number of self-help books, magazines, talk-show hosts, and pop therapy. When, from time to time, people do terrible things to each other or themselves, we are assured that just the right combination of education, medication, . . . . Continue Reading »
I recently needed to track down a reference in a long out-of-print anthology called Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization , published back in 1930. Having got my citation, I was going to return the book when I caught sight, in the table of contents, of a contribution . . . . Continue Reading »