such things in our public discourse as Sheila Jackson Lee’s outburst accusing opponents of a debt ceiling increase on our current President’s terms as motivated by racism. I guess we have to address them, even though time, energy, and attention would be more enjoyably spent . . . . Continue Reading »
Everybody needs to read William Voegeli’s awesome post on how Obama is running circles around the congressional Republicans in the public argument over the debt ceiling increase and cutting the deficit. Somehow Obama is now the one who is serious about controlling the . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Victor Lee Austin talks about his recent book, Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings . He uses the analogy of an orchestra to indicate how fundamental authority is to certain forms of human flourishing. Orchestral music is one of many . . . . Continue Reading »
“Torture and terror are reciprocal phenomena,” says Paul W. Kahn in Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Law, Meaning, and Violence) : “terror is met with torture, and torture with terror.” That is because “both work in the most primitive register of . . . . Continue Reading »
The latest Iowa poll shows Pawlenty behind Romney, Bachmann and Cain. As A.B. Stoddard points out, Pawlenty is even running behind the corpse of Newt Gingrich’s political aspirations. The early polls are lousy predictors of who will win in the end, but those same polls can give . . . . Continue Reading »
Sheldon Wolin ( Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought ) lays great emphasis on the way Christianity “revitalized” political thought and life, yet he argues too that in the end the church failed to transform political ideas: “The supreme irony . . . . Continue Reading »
In response to some comments by Richard Neuhaus about immigration that I posted a few days ago, Jim Rogers of Texas A&M offers this alternative scenario: “My prediction is that within 20 years, if not sooner, the U.S. will be begging Mexicans, and others, to immigrate to the U.S., perhaps . . . . Continue Reading »
In a passionate passage, Farrow enumerates the ways that the church is assaulted for evils that it did more than any other institution to correct - for being misogynist when it “has produced a civilization in which women have enjoyed unprecedented freedom” or for slavery when “for . . . . Continue Reading »
There are three groups of people who consistently have a detrimental affect on American politics: Republicans, Democrats, and pollsters. Of this trio, the most nefarious are the pollsters. While politicians have the ability to create public policy, pollsters have the power to craft public opinion. Although opinion polls are often treated as if they were harmless detritus of the news-cycle, they are powerful tools … Continue Reading »
CB MacPherson argues in his recently reprinted The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Wynford Project) that Hobbes’s view of natural man did not come from study of primitive behavior but from abstracting from the actions of his civilized contemporaries: . . . . Continue Reading »
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