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 »
Thru Walter Olson at Secular Right , I perused this morning the Buckley-hosted Sharon Statement , "adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, on 11 September 1960." Olson wanted to get this point across: the statement’s choice of language can also be seen as a deft stroke of . . . . Continue Reading »
Since I first started blogging at Postmodern Conservative several years ago, I have been picking away, in extremely unsystematic style, at answering this question — largely because I’ve been thinking it through as I’ve been going along. I think that’s a feature, not a bug . . . . Continue Reading »
I have a book review in the November issue of The New Oxford Review of Niall Williams’s novel, John (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pgs., $24.95). I’d link to it but I’m a computer challenged Luddite. UPDATE: here it is [scroll down]. I bring this book to your attention because it is . . . . Continue Reading »
Belief in God would change everything — Freddie In response to my due distance postscript, he writes: James is right, of course, that this doesn’t have to be a moment of despair, but merely a moment of opportunity. There are small graces in this kind of world, if we look for them. James . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m quoting a fairly lengthy portion of our own Peter Lawler’s essay on technology because it does a tantalizing job of raising some fair but serious questions about the limits of Wendell Berry’s — or anyone else’s — dedication to nature as the site of whole . . . . 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 »
One of our country’s most precious inheritance from the Puritans was the more or less compulsory cessation of commercial activity on Sunday. But we Hobbesian/Darwinian survivalists increasingly think there’s not time enough to allow the wasting of even a single day. Or . . . . Continue Reading »
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