Philosophy Articles | Chronicles

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January 14, 2021

When We Live with Lies

By Jeff Minick

We must embrace reality and truth rather than blindly accepting the tenets of political correctness.

Remembering the Right

January 2021

George Carey's Basic Symbols stirred up a hornet’s nest within the academic community. He argued Americans ought to cherish the principles of “good order” and “just and equal laws,” which are not necessarily synonymous with equal rights.

Zoom Boom Driving Self-Absorption Crisis

Blog

December 15, 2020

Zoom Boom Driving Self-Absorption Crisis

By Anders Koskinen

Plastic surgeons believe increased Zoom usage is driving the heightened interest in plastic surgery, as vanity and self-absorption take precedence during our isolation.

Blog

December 4, 2020

Look to the Altar, Not the Throne

By John Howting

When despots want to break a people, they target their religion. If you destroy the cult, you destroy the culture. Without a common culture, a people cannot remain distinct. Civilization has never existed without a strong sense of the supernatural.

What the Editors Are Reading: <em>Who Owns America?</em>

Blog

November 30, 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: Who Owns America?

By Jack Trotter

Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence remains a classic of American political thought and rhetoric. It was intended in part as a sequel to the better-known I’ll Take My Stand

Reviews

December 2020

What I Learned From the Left

By Mark G. Brennan, Stephen B. Presser, Paul Gottfried, Robert L. Paquette, Pedro Gonzalez, Alexander Riley

In this new Review section feature, Chronicles authors and editors recommend significant books and authors from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

What the Editors Are Reading: <em>The Politics</em>

Blog

November 23, 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: The Politics

By Paul Gottfried

What makes Aristotle’s view of political life so remarkable is its total differentness from current political attitudes. Aristotle was not politically correct.

Polemics & Exchanges

November 2020

November 2020 Polemics: His Thoughts Are Not Ours

Letters from Chronicles readers, with occasional responses from the magazine's editors and writers.

Reviews

November 2020

The Church of Money-Grubbing Toil

By Alexander Riley

Americans have venerated capitalism as a species of religion, in which material wealth has become God and a strong work ethic is the ritual way toward the sacred, Eugene McCarraher argues in The Enchantments of Mammon

Remembering the Right

November 2020

Remembering C. S. Lewis

By David Downing

C. S. Lewis was one of the last living specimens of “Old Western Man,” whose worldview was grounded in classical learning and shaped by Christian faith. His was one of the most remarkable writing careers of the 20th century.

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November 2020

Cultural Marxism Is Marxist

By William Lind

Commonly known as political correctness or multiculturalism, cultural Marxism is an ideology that serves as a religion among America’s elites, one that condemns our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture as “racist, sexist, and homophobic.”

The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It's Worse

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November 2020

The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It's Worse

By Paul Gottfried

Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist. The current left is about open borders, filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations, and opposing white Christians.

Reviews

October 2020

Rebranding the Right

By Timothy D. Lusch

In his latest book, Andrew Bacevich argues the "conservative brand" has been tarnished by popular personalities like Trump and Rush Limbaugh. But conservatism is not a brand nor an ideology—it is a disposition and is no place for purity tests.

Reviews

October 2020

Secession Becomes Thinkable

By Donald Livingston

America is coming apart and is "already two nations," F. H. Buckley argues. Once unthinkable, a breakup looks increasingly likely. But can it be done constitutionally and peacefully? Donald Livingston reviews Buckley's case in "American Secession."

Remembering the Right

October 2020

Remembering Russell Kirk

By Jason Jewell

Kirk taught conservatives about the need to engage the culture on levels other than those of law and politics. The conservative, Kirk insisted, must speak on core concerns not normally addressed in public policy manuals.

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October 2020

Death of a Propositional Nation

By William J. Watkins Jr.

The American nation is being destroyed for failing to live up to the ideal of equality. No part of American heritage is safe from destruction in the name of equality, not even that of equality's chief proponent, Abraham Lincoln.

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October 2020

Up From Libertarianism

By C. Jay Engel

Libertarianism was a way forward for those disillusioned with America's two-party system, but it is now clear that the ideals of liberty have been subverted by the left. Only political power can preserve the cultural and ethnic roots of America.

Polemics & Exchanges

September 2020

Evil That Good May Come

"Not one of the four articles debating the pros and cons of dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki presents the orthodox Christian evaluation of that earth-shattering decision." Letters from a priest and columnist Diana West.

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September 2020

The 1620 Project

By Mark David Hall

The Pilgrims were not 21st-century liberal democrats, but they created political institutions and practices that profoundly influenced the course of American politics, and facilitated later experiments in republican self-government and liberty.

The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed

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September 2020

The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed

By Paul Gottfried

Distorted Calvinist beliefs now animate progressive causes. They are responsible for America’s missionary foreign policy, rootedness in individualism, and repugnance for hierarchy.

Catholics in America: An Uneasy Alliance

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September 2020

Catholics in America: An Uneasy Alliance

By Gerald Russello

The speed of the rise of the “woke” brigades and the accelerated abandonment of America’s Christian heritage has once again caused Catholics to doubt the compatibility of their faith with the American experiment.

Remembering the Right

September 2020

Remembering Learned Hand

By Allen Mendenhall

Learned Hand’s advocacy for judicial restraint, bold defense of the First Amendment, and commitment to the legal rights of the states still claim our attention, especially as judicial activism is promoted by legal minds on the left and the right.

Reviews

September 2020

Old Story, New Resonances

By Ronald J. Granieri

Modern politics was born in the French Revolution; knowing its history can enrich our understanding of today’s political challenges. Ronald J. Granieri reviews Jeremy Popkin’s latest book, covering events from the Tennis Court Oath to the Terror.

Reviews

September 2020

Books in Brief

By Paul Gottfried, Edward Welsch

Russian Conservatism, by Paul Robinson (Northern Illinois University Press; 300 pp., $39.95). Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, by Ed West (Constable/Little, Brown; 432 pp., $17.99).

Society & Culture

September 2020

Ressentiment: He Hates, Therefore He Is

By Anthony Esolen

"Ressentiment" festers in the mind of a person until it manifests itself as a false sense of moral righteousness. This concept stems from a feeling of inferiority, and perfectly describes the mindset of today's violent rioters.

Society & Culture

August 2020

Hobbes, the First Individualist

By Jack Kerwick

Too many conservatives get Thomas Hobbes wrong. If Hobbes is the champion of individuality that I contend he is, then he has something important to say to us about our present politics of crisis, which has been on steroids during the last few months.

Blog

June 27, 2020

In Memoriam, Jean Raspail (1925-2020)

By Srdja Trifkovic

The French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died this month. He took a resolute stand against Third World immigration, and condemned communism and capitalism with equal force, as the two monstrous twins born of modernity.

Reviews

July 2020

The Philosopher's Ball Game

By Vito Chiaravalloti

Vito Chiaravalloti artificially altered his body to become a better baseball player. He reviews Alva Noë's book Infinite Baseball, and reflects on the sport and what it means to be a modern human "cyborg," a mix of biology and technology.

Remembering the Right

July 2020

Remembering James Burnham

By Keith Preston

James Burnham gave us an understanding of what he termed the “managerial revolution,” in which the bourgeoisie has been replaced by a new class of managerial elites, educated technocrats that specialize in the management of large organizations.

Remembering the Right

June 2020

Remembering the Southern Agrarians

By Joe Scotchie

In 1920 a group of writers gathered in Nashville for bi-weekly sessions of reading and dissecting each other’s prose and poetry. The group, who defended the traditional Southern way of life, became known as the Southern Agrarians.

Sir Roger Scruton: Britain's Culture Warrior

In Memoriam

March 2020

Sir Roger Scruton: Britain's Culture Warrior

By John M. Vella

I first heard Roger Scruton speak at the 1993 regional Philadelphia Society meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, organized to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Scruton spoke on the topic of “The Conservative Mind...

Society & Culture

March 2020

Historical Revisionism on the Right

By Grant Havers

Nietzsche writes in the concluding section of Twilight of the Idols, “One does not learn from the Greeks—their way is too alien, and also too fluid, to have an imperative effect, a ‘classical’ effect.” The divide between Greek antiquity and...

Remembering the Right

February 2020

Remembering Richard Weaver

By Jay Langdale

Native Southerner and traditionalist conservative, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) was a unique figure in the rise of the modern American right. Weaver, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago, was an historian, literary critic, and...

Remembering the Right

January 2020

Remembering Robert Nisbet

By James Kalb

It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder,...

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January 2020

The Unbearable Burden of Being

By Anthony Esolen

What has brought upon us the madness of the “transgender,” with all its sad denial of the beauty and particularity of male and female? To see the cause, we must diagnose the malady. It is boredom: an irritable impatience with the things that...

Editorials

October 2019

The Epstein Enigma

By Devin Foley

According to the official narrative, on Aug. 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire playboy charged with sex-trafficking minors, committed suicide in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Only a third of American

American Proscenium

June 2014

Suspicious Minds

By Jerry D. Salyer

Will Russian philosophy gain a foothold in Russia? It already has, laments David Brooks in a New York Times op-ed (“Putin Can’t Stop,” March 3).

April 2014

The World Goes Its Way

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

A French writer argues that “humanity” has become the accepted “version of the universal” in contemporary Western thought, functioning as the “action” of modern democratic polity.

January 2014

The Pathology of Postmodernity

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

According to the Viennese doctor, the fundamental problem, or “discontent,” of a civilization is the unrealistic demands it makes of the id, in particular Christian society’s command to love others as we love ourselves.

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May 2013

Plato and the Spirit of Modernity

By E. Christian Kopff

In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle the world of Narnia begins to dissolve and disappear. The Pevensie children are confused and frightened, but Professor Kirke, now Lord Digory, reassures them that the Narnia and the England they had known...

Vital Signs

August 2012

Up From Objectivism

By John Vinson

It was sort of like being caught in a raging stream, and swimming hard against the current, inch by inch, to reach safety. The time was many years ago, when, as a college freshman, I fell into the currents of liberalism. And they were powerful.

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January 2011

In Defense of Private Property

By Claude Polin

For centuries, the propensity to personal ownership has been considered one of the most elementary and natural features of human nature. Criticism of private property is nothing recent, either, but has turned out to be extremely commonplace in...

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January 2011

Proudhon, Beauty and Lego

By Andrei Navrozov

Property may be theft, but it is less theft than a great many other things—clouds, birdsong, or a woman’s beauty, to say nothing of taxation without representation, armed robbery, or extortion with menaces

September 2010

Caring in Colorado (and Everywhere)

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Not long ago I attended a dinner hosted by a Catholic laymen’s organization in the social hall of a church on Colorado’s Front Range. The meal was followed by after-dinner speeches and concluding remarks by an official representing the...

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August 2010

Authentic Communities

By Claude Polin

Deep in the heart of man there is a need imprinted by nature that may very well be his basic difference from all other animals: Being a thinking one—i.e., an animal capable of self-awareness—man needs to be something meaningful in his own...

Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right

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August 2010

Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right

By Jerry D. Salyer

Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization.

Perspective

August 2010

Looking Backwards

By Thomas Fleming

“Whose picture is this, Daddy?” The little blond girl is 11 years old, and, as she flips through the iScraps, her smooth round face shows the first twinge of the questioning mind that will disturb the complacency on which all future happiness...

Vital Signs

July 2010

The Demise of Human Understanding

By Claude Polin

Who in modern Western society has not heard of that category of citizens honorably known as intellectuals? They profess to be the thinking part of the nation, the people whose special calling is to ponder public or private matters.

Reviews

February 2010

Cicero's Legacy

By Matthew A. Roberts

Once a believer in the blessings of modernity and classical liberalism, Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging now considers himself a “convert” to traditional thinking.

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September 2008

David Hume: Historian

By Donald Livingston

Intellectual historians commonly group Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, William Robertson, and David Hume as the four greatest 18th-century historians. If limited to only one of these authors, we would do well to begin with Hume.

Columns

July 2008

Art in the Loo

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Christie’s, the auction house, took a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize the record sale of a painting by a living artist, Lucian Freud, to the tune of $33.6 million. Thirty-three million greenbacks for a portrait of a...

Reactionary Radicals

October 2006

Don’t Blame Bryan

By Jeff Taylor

In his recent biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin joins a long line of historians in making the claim that Bryan (1860-1925) was an ideological precursor of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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December 2005

The Loving Look

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

One warm, late-summer afternoon in Eastern North Carolina, a few hundred primary-school children poured out of their classrooms and waited for their buses to take them far and wide around the county.

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December 2005

Conservatism as Medicine

By Claude Polin

What are the basic tenets of modernity? What is the mind and temper of modern man? I would feel rather foolish to try to reply in a few paragraphs if I did not think that the spirit of modernity boils down eventually to only one idea that...

The Beauty of Holiness, the Holiness of Beauty

Perspective

December 2005

The Beauty of Holiness, the Holiness of Beauty

By Thomas Fleming

The psalmists never tired of praising the beauty and majesty of the Lord's house. Solomon was so eager to build a fitting temple that he traded a good part of Galilee to Hiram of Tyre in exchange for building materials, and the description of the...

Columns

October 2005

A Suppressed Embarrassment

By Paul Gottfried

A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías.

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December 2004

At Home in the Cosmos

By John Francis Nieto

Nelson Head, a boy in a story by Flannery O’Connor, is reared in the rural South, with little sign of education and in obvious isolation. Yet the boy is arrogant to the point of impudence, because he was born in the city.

Correspondence

August 2003

A Northern Light

By Andrei Navrozov

Living in Italy, as I have done for some years, may result in an incremental loss of the vivid sensation, in my view all but indispensable in a writer, that the world as a whole is a barbarous place.

Augustin Cochin and the Revolutionary Process

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July 2003

Augustin Cochin and the Revolutionary Process

By Bernard Dumont

Augustin Cochin, born in 1876, died prematurely—as did so many other French intellectuals of his generation—killed at the front in 1916.

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December 2002

Boethius and Lady Philosophy

By Dr. James Patrick

The political story that shaped Boethius’ life began in 324, when Constantine’s plan to move the capital of the empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Marmora, matured.

Round Table Discussion

January 2001

Distrusting John Locke

By Paul Gottfried

John Locke has been interpreted in various ways that appeal I to conservatives—e.g., as a Christian, albeit a materialist and anti-Trinitarian, or as a qualified defender of private property— but there is a general drift to his thought that...

Vital Signs

April 2000

The Anti-Philosophy of Richard Rorty

By Paul R. Scholle

On the bookstore magazine rack were several copies of Dissent. The cover piqued my interest because it advertised an article by Richard Rorty, an academic philosopher and a professor of mine at Princeton in 1977.

Vital Signs

March 1999

Mere Children

By Peter Kwasniewski

There is a profound difference between the ancient and medieval view of children and the modern cult of the child. The Rousseauean idolatry of nature and worship of savages, popularized through a certain brand of sentimental poetry, helped to...

Vital Signs

December 1997

Thomas Molnar and Late Modern Decadence

By Paul Gottfried

Thomas Molnar has published books in English, French, and Hungarian, while seeing some of his writings, mostly those dealing with the "mal moderne," translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.

Reviews

January 1993

Freudianism and Its Discontents

By William Kilpatrick

Freudian Fraud has an intriguing but difficult-to-prove thesis, namely that Freudian thought radically altered American society for the worse. An "audit of Freud's American account," says Torrey, shows more debits than credits.

Reviews

January 1992

Philosophy in an Old Key

By E. Christian Kopff

In the ancient world no one could talk or read too much about philosophy. Wealthy Athenian nobles, Plato and Xenophon, for instance—even Roman emperors, like Marcus Aurelius—lived for the hours they could devote to philosophical discourse.

Reviews

March 1990

The Consolations of Philosophy

By Thomas Fleming

Philosophy in the 20th century has shared the fate of other high arts whose audiences are increasingly limit ed to an inner circle of adepts. This is partly the fault of a culture that aims at mass production and mass communication, but a good...

Reviews

March 1990

A Meditation on a Meditation

By Marion Montgomery

Why has the South had such a flowering of letters in the interval between World War I and the Korean War? Flannery O'Connor responded to that question by quoting the answer Walker Percy gave when he received the National Book Award for The...

Reviews

March 1990

The Christian Question

By David Klinghoffer

David Novak, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Virginia, sets out to argue the case for what is called Jewish-Christian "dialogue."

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September 1989

The Spiritual Meaning of Philosophy

By Stephen R.L. Clark

In 525 A.D. the Lady Philosophy reminded Boethius, in his death-cell, that true philosophers must think body, rank, and estate of less importance than their understanding of what was truly their own.

Vital Signs

April 1989

Defining Life

By Steven Goldberg

The morality of abortion is entirely a matter of definition: is the fetus a person or not? The definition—whether derived from millennia of religious tradition or from individual analysis and subjective choice—both generates and justifies the...

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April 1988

Reinterpreting Philosophy

By Thomas Molnar

To paraphrase a well-known saying, We are all revisionists now! Yet somehow even our revisionists are timid—they wait for favorable winds before they "revise" history, economics, philosophy, and science, then write books about "how it really...

Reviews

April 1987

Reenchanting the World

By Herbert Schlossberg

Kant has few readers outside of university philosophy departments, but his influence obviously extends to Los Angeles. Part of Kant's legacy to the modern world is the iron curtain that seals off all reality into two compartments: that which can...

Reviews

March 1987

What Is the Good?

By Stanley Rosen

These two unusually interesting collections of studies are in sharp contrast to the contemporary Anglo-Saxon style of academic scholarship. Both authors take seriously the pertinence of classical thought to contemporary discussions of the good.

Correspondence

February 1987

Brown Shirts in the Ivory Tower

By Paul Herron

The orthodoxy of Reason is proclaimed, archconservative turned archliberal Garry Wills once wrote, and it will have its inquisitors.

Olaf Stapledon: Philosopher and Fabulist

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December 1986

Olaf Stapledon: Philosopher and Fabulist

By Stephen R.L. Clark

The most widely known of Merseyside philosophers was never a full-time academic. But he gave classes for the Workers Educational Association from 1912, extra-mural lectures on philosophy from the 20's, gained his Ph.D. in Liverpool in 1925, and...

Reviews

March 1986

Natural Philosophy

At last there is a scientific work that justifies the term natural philosophy. In every discipline there should eventually come a time when it is possible to repeat the words of a great historic occasion in America: the man and the hour are met.

Reviews

October 1985

Smashing "Ugly Monuments"

By David Vicinanzo

Adler begins his latest book with Aristotle's admonition: "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." Adler concludes with a recommendation: "The recovery of basic truths, long hidden from view, would...

Imported

June 1985

Stranded by the Time Machine

By Joseph Schwartz

The publication of these three books is likely only to revive and alter our memory of him — not to change our opinion of his limited value.

Reviews

June 1985

Commendables

By John Shelton Reed, Gary Jason

Thinking Clearly About War, Clear-Eyed Southerner, From the Wilderness to the White House, Satire In and Out of Season.

Typefaces

June 1985

Thunder on the Right

By Thomas Fleming

Intellectuals as a class support their own interests, whether they are kissing the ground a prince walks on or fawning on a Marxist dean or editor.

Reviews

June 1985

In Focus

By Stephen L. Tanner, Lee Congdon

Light From the East, Moll and Mouse

Reviews

June 1985

Waste of Money

By

Not a Prayer, Snake in the Garden

Opinions & Views

January 1985

Making a Morass of Metaphysics

By Bryce J. Christensen

As a young man, Carlyle deeply sensed the need for some "system of metaphysics, not for talk, but for adoption and belief." But after a study of Gibbon, D'Alembert, Hume, and Diderot convinced him that he could no longer accept the Presbyterian...

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December 1984

Reality by the Tail

By Stephen L. Tanner

Under the guise of serious literary treatment of the social-political problems of her country, she indulges her appetite for faddish philosophical- aesthetic playfulness. It is not a successful mix.

Comment

November 1984

Comment

By Leopold Tyrmand

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December 1984

Yeats: A Second Coming

By Robert Berman

It's hard to deal with a writer of this magnitude in a review — perhaps one can only say that this fine edition reminds us now of how accessible Yeats is.

Editorials

December 1984

Confluences

From Dewey to Huey, Pathetic Comedy

Reviews

December 1984

Commendables

A Dangerous Classic, Ideological Body Count, Fighting the Media Moguls, Of Puerile Pedagogy

Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment

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September 1984

Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment

By Bryce J. Christensen

While Ms. Oates leads the nauseous public chorus of liberal critics hailing narcissistic artists as gods, Dr. Lynn stands as a courageous blasphemer who stills the hosannas with a confident and resounding verdict: “This is nonsense, and there’s...

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February 1984

Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment

By Bryce J. Christensen

While Ms. Oates leads the nauseous public chorus of liberal critics hailing narcissistic artists as gods, Dr. Lynn stands as a courageous blasphemer who stills the hosannas with a confident and resounding verdict: “This is nonsense, and there’s...

Comment

February 1984

Comment

By , Otto Scott

If we want a conservative culture, we shall have to think in deeper, braver, broader terms about how to bring such a culture to life.

Imported

December 1983

Open—Or Empty?

By

The work of Eric Voegelin and much in the work of Hannah Arendt provide an effective positive rallying point for anti-positivists.

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