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 »
A liberal Christian may be able to affirm that Jesus literally walked on the water or rose from the dead, yet he still retains the right as an individual to accept only that which supports his own experience of faith. Continue Reading »
Mary Ann Glendon wrote nearly a quarter century ago that “a new form of rights talk has come into being” in contemporary America, in which rights are “presented as absolute, individual, and independent of any necessary relation to our responsibilities. Continue Reading »
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 »
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 »
Apropos of the perennial Locke-run-amok conversation, consider Noah Berlatsky’s piece at the main site : the American spirit galumphs and galerks through every one of the Doctor’s works. Like his fellow citizens, Seuss is boisterous, hearty, optimistic, profligate in invention, and not . . . . Continue Reading »
"Socially crippled" — strangely, this phrase appears to be kosher while regular-old-crippled is out ("differently abled, thank you"). Either way, at Slate, William Saletan is raising a ruckus over the notion that "appearance alone can be grounds for a potentially . . . . Continue Reading »
Contributing to a festschrift devoted to George Carey, our own Peter Lawler reflects on the American founding and the complicated set of sometimes inconsistent principles that is our intellectual inheritance. If it turns out that there is no univocal theory that can decisively be articulated as . . . . Continue Reading »
Thanksgiving is a holiday devoted to the virtue of gratitude which, one could argue, finds less than hospitable ground in the modern world. The Lockean position on nature, that it furnishes only worthless materials that gain value through an imposition of labor, could not be more . . . . Continue Reading »
Freddie : I gotta tell you, I’m such a fan of sweeping ideas and idiosyncratic solutions to social problems that I’m naturally kind of attracted to Newt Gingrich’s new grand scheme , even if it is from one of the more odious people in American politics. Certainly, I think . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
