In "Why Postliberalism Failed," James Patterson and Thomas Howes try to discredit the postliberal challenge to the liberal order, focusing mainly on Catholic postliberalism. They believe that more liberalism is the solution to the present social decadence, but in truth what is needed are the movements of God’s grace, like those that gave rise to [...]
A Christian humanist embraces not only the ethics and morality of Socrates and Christ, but he also loves the liberal arts and liberal education as a means to distance oneself from the immediacy and materialism of this world. As a Christian humanist, one seeks the eternal within time. This is part three of a series. [...]
America, Daniel Mahoney writes, “remains a largely if only partially free country, though markedly less so than even in the recent past.” The danger we face is a declining understanding and assumption of the classical, biblical, and Christian categories of reality that ward off the insanity of an anti-human “Second Reality." The Persistence of the [...]
In the Whig view to which Edmund Burke subscribed, the validity of law is independent of its source; who makes a rule, whether the people or a tyrant, is irrelevant. The Old-Whig Burke denied that the exercise of will, whether arbitrary or rational, has anything to do with the determination of law. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender [...]
To study the past requires a sense of tragedy and perhaps a belief in original sin, “the imagination of disaster” as Henry James called it. The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our annual exercise in national amnesia and self-congratulation, by contrast, promotes the myth that “all’s well that ends well.” Only the most [...]
Lord Acton believed that the wrong side won the American Civil War. Such a judgment could hardly be said to be a minor detail of someone’s historical worldview, yet this judgment has somehow been obscured. “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to [...]
We turn to the Great Books so that the encounter with them might do for us what they did for past generations. We turn to them as world makers, that they might aide us in understanding the world they were instrumental in bringing about, our world... “Today, is greatness still possible?’ ~Nietzsche[1] “Ideas do not [...]
Edmund Burke, like his Whig forebears, believed in the existence of a higher moral law to which all valid positive law must conform, a universal law which manifests itself in diverse concrete forms, in the great variety of legal codes and customs that constitute particular cultural traditions. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the “ancient [...]
The problem of political unity is a perennial question of political philosophy because it is always timely. How do the many become and remain one body politic? In other words, how can a plurality of individuals, all with their own immediate concerns, aptitudes, and interests, cohere as a single people or nation? This question is [...]
N.B. This is a piece I wrote in the early 1990s. I had forgotten completely about it until I came across it by accident today (Wednesday, August 22). It was my first attempt at a dissertation proposal, and I wrote it for one of my favorite graduate school professors, Dr. Russell Hanson. He probably doesn’t remember me, [...]