My name has appeared on the masthead now for almost two months, but i have hesitated to pen an inaugural entry, especially since, unlike some of the others in the group, i have no full-fledged manifesto to announce. And — as these things go — the longer one waits, the more difficult it . . . . Continue Reading »
Can everyone please stop finding Martin Buber interesting? Benjamin Balint, this means you : . . . Chief among these [misconceptions about Buber] is the common misjudgment that what is original about I and Thou , Buber’s classic statement of a philosophy of dialogue, is its teaching about . . . . 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 can surely make a reasonable argument that Sarah Palin was underqualified to be the next Vice President. Nevertheless, I argue here that the hyperventilated contempt shown for her by our cosmopolitan elites reveals a caricatured and ugly dismissal of the lives of ordinary Americans. It’s . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the hallmarks of the modern conception of man is a kind of anxious inquietude — we struggle to ovecome the diremption and alienation that haunts our consciousness. In the Lockean account, our restlessness is a function of our distance from nature — our capacity for . . . . Continue Reading »
What are the springs of action that material well-being might unbend or loosen? I suppose they’re all the things that have to do with — acquiring material well-being, up to a point, of course. Everyone seems to agree that somewhere in the range of economic flourishing there is a point . . . . Continue Reading »
Lock your doors, hide the children, and frighten the horses—"femme theory" has come to town! As a heterosexual girl who is nevertheless more femme-y than feminine, I’ve been following Sublime Femme ‘s "Rethinking High Femme" series ( part 1 , part 2 ) with . . . . Continue Reading »
This may hurt a little. Any man, no matter who, will respond to a recording of his own voice with "Wait, I really sound like that?" That’s what I felt last week as I heard a smart young student speak in praise of suffering at an ISI lecture, for the slightly embarrassing reason that . . . . Continue Reading »
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