In “Big Wonderful Thing: A Texas History,” Stephen Harrigan explores the “poignantly unguarded self-love” and the “fierce national personality” that oozes from Texans. He is unapologetic in his praise for and fascination with the state. “Big Wonderful Thing,” however, is not a tribute piece; instead, Mr. Harrigan’s history carefully holds in tension the grandeur and [...]
What if the fundamental problem in the American academy is a loss of institutional identity that has nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology? What if the modern university simply is no longer dedicated to being a house of learning and a community of scholars? Jake Meador’s article in The Atlantic* about the decline [...]
The Western canon is not known for its brevity. Herodotus’s Histories clocks in around 190,000 words. Ovid’s Metamorphoses recounts the myths of the Greco-Roman gods and heroes for 130,000 words. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov concludes in about 360,000 words. And Thomas Aquinas stares down at them all from his summit of 1.8 million. While [...]
Adam Smith is too often positioned as the godfather of “unfettered markets, libertarian governments, interactions solely for the purpose of satisfaction, and atomistic cosmopolitanism.” What has been lost is Smith’s “clarion call for personal relationships” as the basis for human society. Legend has it that at the age of four, Adam Smith was kidnapped from [...]
It is easy to forget that tolerance was not original to the Enlightenment. After all, this is the narrative handed to us by most scholars and pundits. We forget that during the Reformation entire regions and cities like Alsace, Ravensburg, Lausanne, and Augsburg developed types of bi-confessionalism, where different confessions shared civic power and public [...]