Category: Political Theory

In Praise of Uncertainty
Imagine that you are a young man and one day your father commands you to find the donkeys that have wandered off, like poor young Saul was commanded to do in 1 Samuel. How will you do this? To find the...

Book Review: The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy Connolly
By Coyle Neal In some ways, Dr. Joy Connolly’s introduction to the formal study of Rome mirrors my own. “I began to study the republican tradition in earnest in 2001, at a time when the promise of rescue it offered—by...

Debating the Actual Crisis of Liberalism
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the Mortara debate prompted by Fr. Cessario at First Things, I want to ask a more general question about the state of play between the more radical anti-liberals in the religious conservative...

A Consequentialist Theory of Voting
By Stephen Wolfe The Trump and Moore political campaigns raise an important question for Christians: does one endorse the moral life of the candidate he votes for? Surprisingly, there seems to be consensus on this, regardless of one’s willingness to...

On the City and the Gods: A Lost Chapter of Aristotle
By Greg Forster Having considered Socrates’ proposals in the Republic for the community of women and property, and his somewhat modified proposals in the Laws, we now consider his fanciful proposal in the less well-known dialogue Glaucon for a city...

The City and the Gods: The Case for the Liberal Order
I’m pleased to publish this guest feature from Dr. Paul D. Miller of the ERLC.

Polis/Counter-polis: On the Civic Benedict Option
October 2016 was a simpler, more innocent time. We were all youths, wet behind the ears; we look back at ourselves with a kind of bemused affection. Rod Dreher assumed, surely—we all assumed—that Hillary Clinton would win in November, that...

On Gratitude and the Fifth Commandment
We are pleased to publish this guest feature from Dr. Eric Hutchinson of Hillsdale College. In my first two posts, we’ve seen what the classical two-kingdoms distinction was for the sixteenth century Reformers, whether “Lutheran” or “Reformed,” and also the...

Forget Milo. Roger Scruton Can Make CPAC Great Again
We are pleased to publish this guest feature by Bryan Baise. On Monday, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) rescinded their invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos after a video recording emerged which many interpreted to be a defense of pedophilia. Milo has...

On the Executive Order Regarding Refugees
Over the weekend, I suggested that the text of the now infamous and widely criticized Executive Order on refugees was, as written, “neither insane nor obviously unChristian.”