A primary theme that runs throughout The Reasonableness of Christianity is John Locke’s belief that men who attempt to understand natural law and morality through their faculty of reason alone often fail at their task. But why is it that reason alone, also according to Locke, can explain Revelation? The question this essay poses might seem somewhat [...]
Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture… In the history of science, the only [...]
Ask anyone what speech “is for” and the answer will be, “Speech is for communication.” To be sure. But not primarily! Speech is first for self-address... My first title for this little musing was “Silent Speech.” That, however, turned out to be inaccurate. As I thought out what had set me wondering about this strange [...]
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The gospel of St. John is the most poetic of the gospels and contains the highest Christology of the gospel accounts of Jesus Christ. Some scholars see a division of the work in thematic groups—the book of [...]
What ought to take primacy when carrying out research and interpreting seminal books: the text itself, or the context? A known critic of historicism and contextualism, Leo Strauss published his seminal essay, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in 1957 in the Journal of Politics and introduced a problem with the field: Modern academic obsessions over [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Christine Norvell as she considers the model of scholarly endeavor embodied by John of Salisbury. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also [...]
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 [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in The Abolition of Man, we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests... No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
Edmund Burke understood that the individual’s own natural reasoning would never be as deep or profound as the wisdom of our ancestors, bequeathed to us through tradition and custom. He believed that looking inwards, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated, would precipitate our demise… On our college campuses, the clashes between liberals and conservatives have grown [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win… Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a [...]
“Since that night, I have a fire within me, which I cannot quench. I tried knowing God through reason. But now I must share the truth and the certainty that God has confirmed in my heart. I never thought a sense of peace and the passion of fire could reside in one’s heart simultaneously”… [...]
Over the course of several hundred years, Americans, as well as Europeans, freed themselves from the past, transformed nature into a commodity, centralized political power, and instituted bureaucracies, all with the aim of making themselves happy in this world… Unlike Eve eating fruit from the forbidden tree, the beginning of the Second Fall can [...]
Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. For prejudices are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience… Prejudice becomes a flail to beat enemies—traditional distinctions, essential to a workable society, come under assault as founded [...]
A living system getting too close to the edge of chaos risks incoherence, but moving too far away risks rigidity, either case leading to extinction. Complex systems flourish at the edge of chaos. For the imaginative conservative, real thought, reflection, and learning often take place at the edge of chaos… Studying history teaches us [...]