The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution
The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution, by Paul Horwitz Any attempt at fairness in evaluating The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution must start by recognizing the light touch and good will Paul Horwitz brings to a topic fraught with ponderous and cryptic argumentation, punctuated by outright acrimony. If the book fails [...]
The Southern Critics: An Anthology
The Southern Critics: An Anthology Edited by Glenn C. Arbery, ISI Books A Southern critic by any other name would be an Agrarian or Fugitive. Four of the writers featured in this book defended their way of life against modernity 80 years ago at Vanderbilt University in “I’ll Take My Stand.” The others given voice here [...]
Why I am Not a Libertarian
The contemporary Tea Party Movement, like its revolutionary ancestor, looks to principles for guidance. Yet an old but active fault line runs just beneath the surface of the movement that has the potential to cause a fatal rupture. Tea Partiers simultaneously promote both a conservatism based upon the principles of the American founding and a [...]
Diplomatic Duties: Who Commissioned Us to Remake the World?
U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so. In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has been tied to color-coded or [...]
Why is Ideology Attractive?
To what end were 205 million human persons—created in the Image of God—murdered in the twentieth century, one must ask? And, why did millions more suffer for being simply human persons, unique, unfathomable, unrepeatable? The answer, unfortunately, is not an easy one, and very few scholars—historians, philosophers, or theologians—have attempted to answer this question. In [...]
Rehabilitating Robert Frost: The Unity of His Literary, Cultural, & Political Thought
Poetry was to Robert Frost a special form of human revelation. It was distinct from the divine or prophetic revelations of religion, the rational understanding of philosophy and science, and the prudential wisdom of history. It was the only way mankind had of saying one thing in terms of another, aimed at insight and wisdom. [...]
The God of Men—and of Elves: Tolkien, Lewis, and Christian Mythology
C.S. Lewis From earliest times, Christians have argued about the role of pagan learning in Christian education. The debate has never gone away, but generally speaking the church has preferred rather to use the learning of the pagans than to repudiate it. An essential part of the classical Christian education that held sway [...]