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A Good Word for Locke

The lecturer was setting forth a biblical perspective on the role of government, with special attention to the Pauline text in Romans 13. At one point he introduced a rhetorical flourish with a passing negative reference to John Locke. The Bible sees the authority to govern as coming from God—“and not,” the lecturer said, “from a human contract, as John Locke insisted.” Continue Reading »

The Voracious Nought

I just got back from giving a lecture at a small liberal-arts college. The tenured professors were complaining. (That, after all, is allegedly what tenure gives professors the unlimited right to do). Their main complaint: Students are no longer doing the reading for “core texts” or . . . . Continue Reading »

The Coen Brothers’ TRUE GRIT and the Western

This week I am appropriately traveling to Hollywood, a town that owes its fortune to the Western more than to any other genre, for the Western Political Science Association meeting, where I will be presenting a paper titled “Cowboys and Corpses: The Moral Perils of the State of Nature in the . . . . Continue Reading »

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