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A conservative take on the world
So I hope I didn’t offend either American Conservatives or crunchy conservatives in my previous post. I was trying to burst stereotypes about conservatives in general for an audience unfamiliar with their work. So I’m going to digress once again by thinking a bit about being crunchy and being ...
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So here's an article (really blog) from the interesting journal The American Conservative. The AC has two themes: America ought to be a republic, and not an empire. And America is held together by our distinctive traditions—and not some abstract ideology. American Conservatives don't think that ...
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The Democrats, at their convention, stood so stridently for the rights of the liberated single woman that they offered the Republicans the opportunity to counter with a defense of the moral virtue of ordinary Americans devoted to God, family, country, and worthwhile work well done. Most Americans ...
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This is my second installment in a series on excellent TV shows and the 2012 election. I'm skipping over Girls for now and turning to the HBO series Big Love. You might ask, of course, why I'm telling you about a show that's no longer on. My obvious answer is the idea of a repeat or a rerun is ...
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We're having a conference—sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—at Berry College next Friday and Saturday on POP CULTURE and REAL CULTURE. All the details can be found here. YOU are certainly invited. The conference will be attended by and directed toward students from a variety of ...
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Well, you can't miss the new film Lincoln. Here's the big reason: Daniel Day-Lewis' Lincoln is pretty much WHO we will think of when imagining the person "Father Abraham" from now on. He really looks like the lanky, awkward Lincoln. He has the mannerisms down, including those of the world-class ...
Here’s a thought of the novelist Walker Percy’s searching character Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman: For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything ...
It's been fashionable for a long time now to deny all evidence for human uniqueness, for the singular greatness of members of our species. So it's refreshing to read Michael Trimble's claim that "The notion that animals can weep—apologies to Dumbo, Bambi, and Wlibur—has no scientific foundation ...
For a couple of days, I was inclined to buy the theory that Obama won the election because his campaign was so "metric driven." Metric driven in this case seems to mean the Machiavellian science of manipulation of the voters. It's measurable knowledge of who's going to vote and why in key places ...
The president's decisive 60+% electoral college victory can be contrasted, of course, with his very narrow popular vote margin. Our Constitution has the effect of magnifying his win, giving it something of the feel of a mandate. The president has decided not to comment on how darn close the ...
A good thing about ELECTIONS is that they remind us we have a CONSTITUTION. They especially remind us that we're a really, really constitutional people. Lots of Americans really hate the president and think he's a dangerous "progressive" menace. And lots of Americans hate Romney and think he's ...
So one reason for LIBERAL EDUCATION is to give students some sense of the genealogy of our ideas. It seems as if everyone believes in free persons these days. Not only that, we tend to believe that the PERSON is the bottom line. Nothing trumps the security and freedom of the persons alive ...
James Ceaser, perhaps our most distinguished student of American politics on the conservative side, isn't about predicting the outcome of elections. That's actually hard to do. And those political scientists who predict outcomes correctly well in advance are almost always just lucky. This ...
So the best reason to read a "great book" is that you might learn a lot from it about who you are and what you're supposed to do. In that spirt, I'm reading a variety of great books with two students this semester—Jacob Stubbs and Kristian Canler. The authors include Pascal, Leo Strauss, Allan ...
So I've gotten a lot (meaning several) emails complaining that I haven't gotten around to keeping my promise of talking about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Well, sorry. Here's one reason why. I'm actually teaching that fascinating—and flawed—book right now, and I thought you ...