What happens when our nation’s fundamental principles or standards are rejected? Jennifer Roback Morse’s new book, The Sexual State, is a lively and forceful examination of where we came from, where we are now, and where we ought to be on matters of human life… Genesis tells us that man was created “male and female.” The [...]
Present in all love is the love that God has for each of His creatures. In loving our neighbor, even the worst sinner, we love what God loves in him. But God’s love for us includes a final judgment about our lives... “Hell is the place God created for the angels who rebelled against him. [...]
To save democracy from subjectivism, truth must become a democratic project. The greatest of crimes can be enacted in the name of sincerity, authenticity, and “being at peace with oneself.” Each of these criteria looks to one’s own estimate of oneself… During the Presidential Campaign of 1996, in California, President Bill Clinton said that democracy [...]
No good Muslim, unless he is trying to deceive us, has any doubt that Allah is exactly as he is described in the Koran... Most people know that the Quran (Qur’an, Koran) is the holy book of the Muslim religion, hence of about a fifth of the world’s population. But knowing this much, we still must [...]
The college student needs the virtue that enables him to see the origins, the first principles. He will do this by reading and conversing—even by prayer and fasting… Even students in religious-founded institutions can lose their faith, while others find God at Ohio State University. Some students mold themselves to the prevailing campus ideology, while [...]
It is difficult to see ourselves as we are, even if this inner “seeing” is one of the most important things we must do for ourselves… In today’s world, when the topic of the defects of university teaching and curricula comes up, the most well-known alternative put forward is the “great books programs.” I take it [...]
The completion of Plato lies in the resurrection, in the reality that sees not just the immortality of the soul but the acting person as the source of all reason… Is there any way to bring political philosophy and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, into a coherent, non-contradictory relation to each other without undermining the integrity [...]
The mystery is how one person whom I never met, through recountings down the ages of how many others whom I also have never met, could shed light on each other, eventually to enlighten me… In The Apology, Socrates brought up the question of whether he was paid for being a teacher, like the Sophists, who were paid for their skill in [...]
To link spiritualism, political philosophy, and play together is, at first sight, rash. What could they possibly have in common, since they clearly are not the same?… Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems to [...]
Christianity is expected to reach, through the human and divine agency of its members, each human being at the core reality in his soul, at the reality of the choice where each person makes himself to be what he chooses to be within the initial givenness of his being… It was God who reconciled us [...]
The Myth of Liberalism offers a concise argument of the adequacy of modern liberalism and a re-presention of how classical/medieval understanding of family and virtue really is a superior understanding of the human good… “Contemporary liberalism is less a political philosophy than a façade for undermining extant social and legal mores.” —John Safranek, The Myth [...]
The country appears to be radically divided. We even hear talk of a new kind of civil war. Civic unity depends on an agreed vision of what man is and what the world is. When this agreement is lacking, nothing can really hold that society together… Civility means to act as one would in a [...]
Tyrants—intelligent, charming men as they usually are—rush into politics without first examining their souls. Politics without wisdom is not politics… A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the education of a young man who wants to achieve the highest things, which he considers to be achieved primarily through his ruling the [...]
What is new about our era, as opposed to the Christianity of an Augustine, of an Aquinas, or of a Shakespeare, is that now we actually see Christians themselves betraying their own traditions of political limitations… Shakespeare as Political Thinker, edited by John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981) For some [...]