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 »
Our own Peter Lawler is the James Brown of the blogosphere, the hardest working man in the business. Over at the the Encyclopedia Britannica blog , he argues that a "postmodernism, rightly understood" is essentially a realism that counters our modern tendency towards . . . . Continue Reading »
Larry Arnhart provides this characteristically astute response to my post below about Darwinian Conservatism. Instead of offering a genuinely postmodern view, he criticizes me for adopting a "distinctly modernist assumption of transcendendalist dualism" that traffics in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Larry Arnhart is surely the best proponent of Darwinian Conservatism, and not just because he has a blog with the same name. In his view, an evolutionary biological account of nature properly captures our intellectual and moral capacities, the emergence of consciousness itself, and grounds a . . . . Continue Reading »
Adam Kirsch has an extraordinary takedown of Slavoj Zizek at The New Republic, and this is the first of a few things I’ll say about parts of it. So: the passage in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle where Zizek discusses the ideological function of Nazi anti-Semitism: "one could say that even if . . . . Continue Reading »
Michael Weiss has a fine piece on David Foster Wallace at The Weekly Standard . The Wallace quote I am snipping here, which closes the piece, is nothing very new or groundbreaking (anymore? Rieff had him beat by at least a decade). But note the phrasing I’m putting in bold: The next real . . . . Continue Reading »
1. Pinch hitting at Schwenkler’s, William R. Brafford solicits my comment on the friendly R.R. Reno’s latest: I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important . . . . Continue Reading »
Our own Peter Lawler gives an account of human nature and our peculiar capacity for technologically transforming it. Considering the views of Heidegger, Wendell Berry, and Pascal he argues that while our attraction to the rational manipulation of nature is a defining hallmark of our being, the new . . . . Continue Reading »
A maximalist, Mr. Luhrmann doesn’t simply want to rouse your laughter and tears: he wants to rouse you out of a sensory-overloaded stupor with jolts of passion and fabulous visions. That may make him sound a wee bit Brechtian, but he’s really just an old-fashioned movie man, the kind . . . . 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 »
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