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Hörcher adeptly elucidates how Scruton’s belief in the intertwining of aesthetics, morality, and politics stands as a bulwark against the often fragmented worldview of today’s modern thinkers.
Perhaps the greatest lesson Plenty Coups has to offer us is this: prudence and courage in the face of an unknown future make sense if they are grounded on God’s greater love for us and the promise of his abiding care. Hope impels us to hand on our religious and cultural inheritance even as many reject it. It encourages us to build new institutions as old ones fall apart.
The liberal tradition is an ongoing conversation in which participants speak in a wide range of accents, reflecting the various “nouns” to which speakers are committed: liberal individualists and liberal communitarians, liberal nationalists and liberal internationalists, liberal believers and liberal skeptics, liberal socialists and—yes—liberal free marketeers.
Many students may not appreciate the importance of applying themselves rather than using AI, but we must encourage those who do. We should fortify promising students with the assurance that excellence in education is worth pursuing but requires taking a hard road.
At the moment, large language models are nothing like us, however easy it is for us to anthropomorphize their outputs. But as AIs develop, it will become increasingly necessary to ask: How much do we want them to become like us? Answering that question will certainly require human wisdom.
In his impressive 2020 book, Carl Trueman rightly exhorts readers to solidify their commitments to God and moral truth in a world of “expressive individualism.” But by reading human nature through the Marxist-Hegelian lens of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, he undermines the true individualism at the heart of the ethics that he wants to defend.
A liberal education pursued in good faith, that is, with civility, generosity, humility, and an earnest desire (among teachers and students) to think for oneself and to learn from and with others, tends to render us all more thoughtful, reflective, and humane.
The point of a Christian liberal education is to take on the mind of God and to be conformed to Christ, or at least to begin to do so, for such a project is endless. This means that a Christian liberal arts school will seek to impart to its students some measure of wisdom and holiness.
The problem with the way that discussions surrounding university education are often framed is that they seem to accept as inevitable a pernicious anthropology that presumes students are autonomous subjects, consuming in order to be consumed. But we are more than what we achieve, more than we produce, more than our billable hours.
If our immediate surroundings and concrete responsibilities constitute the arena in which we are most uniquely competent, then reserving our attention for those objects is not quietism, but the pinnacle of activism.
Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
Treating data centers, just like fleshly human bodies, as irrelevant or inconvenient, and claiming the world wide web, not the material world, as sovereign over our “true” selves, makes this kind of thinking into a form of techno-theology.
We do not need more self-conscious crusaders for the nation or even for Western Civilization, but instead more priests, teachers, businessmen, artists, writers, and parents who perform their own activities faithfully, serving—to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk—as “leaven for the whole lump.”
In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
If sexual attraction is one powerful force that God built into the world to counteract the individual’s inclination to self-absorption, then the combination of technological and cultural assaults on this urge doesn’t threaten only the formation of families, the basic unit of society. It also threatens something even more foundational: the nature of the person as a social being.
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
“My book is based on a series of dangerous ideas that have led us to where we are now. Beginning with the insidious theories of John Money, these ideas progressed through the fields of psychology and psychiatry and eventually infiltrated our educational and legal systems—corrupting many of the country’s most powerful institutions.”
Such a substantial proportion of this book is devoted to textualism, originalism, and traditionalism that it is hard to escape the sense that Sunstein protests too much by repeatedly claiming that his moral-philosophizing “reflective equilibrium” is “the only game in town.” And in truth, he leaves his own preferred approach woefully underdeveloped.
In his new book, William Inboden clearly regards Reagan as indispensable to something coming close to a miraculous chain of events surrounding the peaceful end of the Cold War. He rejects the popular notions of Reagan as clueless, all form and no substance, gullible, or hopelessly and sentimentally patriotic. This is a sympathetic biography, but one that is copiously researched and laden with fresh and insightful nuances that treat Reagan as a complex figure, a man with limitations, paradoxes, and weaknesses.
What the sexual revolution began by upsetting gender roles and obscuring the necessary link between marriage and procreation, the reproductive revolution continues, shattering our conceptions of motherhood and fatherhood and severing the bond between parents and children.
Audiobooks’ greatest potential is to encourage a sense of receptivity and leisure throughout the rest of life, not just one’s reading life. Listening to a novel, accepting its rhythms and flow of detail on the book’s own terms, is a gentle reminder that life’s most glorious things demand quiet, silent admiration, and loving acceptance.
A Web of Our Own Making overflows with disquieting observations about the ways digital technology is reshaping human nature. Antón Barba-Kay puts into haunting words the anxiety, exhaustion, and emptiness that most of us feel but cannot put into words because we are too busy scrolling and ogling.
Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land represents a landmark contribution to the debate over the impact of Christian faith on American law and culture. It is high time for Christians to reframe this debate, asking not “How much do we have to apologize for?” but “How much can we take credit for?”
A growing number of doctors, patients, and whistleblowers are beginning to question the medical establishment’s recommendations for children with gender dysphoria.