There’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly pushing an ideological agenda that lurks behinds all their jargon and “methods.” That’s somewhat true. When applied to the lives of human [...]
Here is what I learned from the article* about Amazon in the New York Times: Amazon is the place where your performance is constantly monitored with the latest metrics and you better not have a baby or get cancer. And where you embrace the “purposeful Darwinism” that encourages you to rat out your fellow employees [...]
Thinking about manliness as a cause of the behavior of the only beast who exists—because of his speech—between the other beasts and God should give us confidence in the real and permanent existence of the human individual. America’s two most astute social commentators, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield and the novelist Tom Wolfe, have weighed [...]
One difference between postmodern conservatives and other contributors to First Thoughts has to do with being influenced by Leo Strauss. Each pomoncon can speak for himself (or herself). But I would say that we all regard that influence as making us better and especially more astute thinkers and readers of first-rate books than we would otherwise be. So [...]
Miya Tokumitsu writes* with incisive elegance about our altogether elitist and self-indulgent view that our experts have these days about the relationship between love and work. That view, of course, originates mainly from Silicon Valley: Your great work, which you love, is so creative and productive that it makes you fabulously rich, as well. You don’t have [...]
Thanks so much to Carl for his able account—complete with astutely copious quoting—of Yuval Levin’s essay in Modern Age.* Modern Age, of course, was founded by Russell Kirk and has remained infused with “traditionalist” conservatism, which is often contrasted (as it is by our James Ceaser) with libertarianism and “natural rights” conservatism. Yuval ably displays his [...]
Alan Jacobs patiently explains why even the most scrupulous of scholars can’t understand the first thing about Flannery O’Connor’s stories without at least a good deal of biblical literacy.* Well, a real poet or a person with genuine artistic and psychological sensitivity can understand something about her writing without the Bible. John Huston’s film version [...]
So there was a decent article in the WSJ calling upon conservatives to stop trashing the liberal arts. The argument: Conservatives respect the wisdom of our Founders, and Jefferson and the others really thought that liberal education as bookish civic education, at least, was indispensable for self-governing citizens. We need to be educated to be [...]
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The program really does has a Christian/Augustinian focus without in any way neglecting either classical or modern authors. Now, according to Tocqueville, the point of higher education today is [...]
So I’ve written an article* for Yuval’s National Affairs that’s all about sustaining truly higher education in America through deploying libertarian means to achieve non-libertarian ends. There’s a sense in which all libertarians are for that, of course. In a free country, the money we make through being productive is for satisfying our (subjective) personal [...]
I need to preach from a Christian text. Being Catholic, I often don’t think of the Bible first in searching for said text. We’ve been reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in my little side seminar on Christian political thought. Before Chesterton, we read Pascal and Saint Augustine. And that prepared one of my students to criticize Chesterton, [...]
So I have in my hands the galleys of our Ralph Hancock’s lovingly expert translation of Pierre Manent’s Seeing Things Politically. Let me explain why you should buy it from St. Augustine’s Press as soon as it comes out. Pierre Manent is probably the most deeply original, broadly erudite, and genuinely politically engaged thinker alive [...]
One of our slogans is libertarian means for non-libertarian ends. That one works especially well in education. A big danger to the moral and intellectual diversity that graces our country’s mixture of public and private education—especially higher education—is increasingly intrusive bureaucratic government and quasi-governmental entities, such as accrediting agencies. In this category of homogenizing intruders [...]
So thanks to Carl for talking up Carson Holloway, The Imaginative Conservative, and civilized leisure. Carson is also a forceful opponent of judicial supremacy. That is the view that the Court says what the Constitution is, the view that fuels the renewed focus on (libertarian) judicial activism. The Court does not, in fact, have to [...]