Here is a rather silly story, brought to my attention by The Imaginative Conservative’s own Stephen Masty. It should tell us something about how very silly lawyers’ views of morals and the law have become in recent years. According to Religion News Service, among others, one Dola Indidis, a lawyer in Kenya, has petitioned the International [...]
Robert Hutchins Studying and leading conversations on the Great Books for more than twenty years still produces that sense of awe and wonder, especially when I discover a new tool to aide in the exploration of wisdom. Unfortunately, this excitement is often curtailed when I engage many of those within the academy. Once, [...]
On August 24, 1814, in one of history’s most farsighted and selfless moments, British troops burned down Washington, DC. Americans never even thanked them, only rebuilt and wasted the opportunity. It’s time to make amends. Every heartland town needs a down-home barbecue with children waving American flags and Union Jacks, with red-white-and-blue sparklers before Tea-Partiers [...]
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and [...]
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system and give degrees based on real demonstration of measurable competencies valuable in the 21st century marketplace, and you’ll find out what studying Plato’s Republic is really worth. [...]
Wearing a bow tie is a way of broadcasting an aggressive lack of concern for what other people think.– Warren St. John, The New York Times Bow ties tend to provoke strong reactions. For some they conjure images of Winston S. Churchill standing firm against German bombings or of a young Frank Sinatra crooning. Others [...]
Dr. James Otteson In the world of ideas, things can move rapidly. On August 19, 2013, one of the single best minds of our era, James R. Otteson II, announced his move to North Carolina to become the Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and a full professor [...]
Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning [...]
I. Burke’s Legal Erudition Edmund Burke (1729–1797), was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and even before he graduated from Trinity College in 1749, his father, Richard Burke, registered him as a student of law in the Middle Temple in London. At age twenty-one, in 1750, Burke went to London to study law. At [...]
Attorney General Eric Holder Eric Holder, the Attorney General who brought us, among other things, the Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, along with its cover up, and a sneering rejection of Congress for finding him in contempt, has struck another blow against the rule of law. Holder has decided that he does not [...]
The traditional ideal of the professor—a vaguely eccentric, impractical seeker of truth always teetering, like the Greek philosopher Thales, on the brink of some well or other—has all but disappeared. Though obviously a caricature, this stereotype at least captured the essence of what a professor should be: someone whose life is passionately consumed with the [...]
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is commonly seen as an indictment of both tyranny and technology. Huxley himself described its theme as “the advancement of science as it affects human individuals.”[1] Brave New World Revisited (1958) deplored its vision of the over orderly dystopia “where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal [...]
The only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will.– G. K. Chesterton A book I much admire is the detective writer P.D. James’s little book, Talking About Detective Fiction, a distillation of the author’s insights into the genre she has practiced so well for nearly five decades. [...]
Historians come in all different shapes and sizes. The well-known ones, those mass-market storytellers we invite into our homes by way of television or bestseller, display enough variety to suit most tastes. There’s David McCullough, courtly and urbane as a Renaissance bishop; Ken Burns, bearded and earnest in the required PBS manner; Michael Beschloss, bronzed [...]