Category: Liberal Arts
Finding Redemption through Recurring Love in “Groundhog Day”
I made the mistake of watching Groundhog Day for the first time during the summer I was studying for the bar exam. I was trapped in the living nightmare of studying the same material, every day, with seemingly no end...
Three Worlds and Two Christianities
At a recent book launch in Melbourne, one of Australia’s leading Christian scholars, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, astutely observed that Richard Niebuhr’s models of Christ and culture, a framework which has wielded great influence for decades, is now outdated. Irving-Stonebraker’s further stated...
St Paul the Word Sower
“Word sower” deserves reviving. It comes from the Douay-Rheims translation of Acts 17:18: “What is it, that this word sower would say?” The word sower in question is the Apostle Paul, visiting Athens. “Word sower” is a literal rendering of...
The Withering of Persuasion
What are any of us doing when we take up our avatars and handles to enter into fights on Facebook and Twitter? When we post links and frame them with incendiary remarks as though sharing the link was itself a...
Small and Afraid and Without Knowledge
On May 11, 1997, a computer program won a chess match against a world champion for the first time in history. The defeated Garry Kasparov said that after Game 5, “he had become so dispirited that he felt the match...
After After Virtue
Jon Askonas’ Compact piece does not bury the lede. Conservatism has failed, in his view, and it has failed because it mistook the problem at hand. It mistook the seismic shift of technology for a simple lack. Askonas writes that...
There is no materialist path to the promised land.
“Eden is that old-fashioned House We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode Until we drive away.” ~Emily Dickinson “We shall never find / That lovely land / Of might-have-been” ~Ivor Novello “Literature is called artistic when it depicts...
Too Large for One Life: On Friction and Sustaining Tradition
There’s a tremendous gap between making an argument for tradition and inviting someone into a living tradition. In his Compact essay, “Why Conservatism Failed,” Jon Askonas argues that conservatives have retreated prematurely to the world of ideas and abandoned the...
Fight Progressivism. Be Liberal.
In 2017 and 2018, Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argued that classical liberalism and progressivism are indistinguishable. Pick your metaphor: Progressivism is the fruit of liberalism’s poisoned tree. The liberal seed led inexorably to the progressive flowering. Or, liberalism...
John Quincy Adams: Christian Nationalist?
In the February of 1824, politically active Calvinists across the northern United States finally got their wish for a godly devout president who made the American republic a more explicitly Christian and righteous nation. The House of Representatives chose John...