Summer Vacation

VoegelinView begins Summer vacation on June 4th and will resume September 4th. During the summer months we will feature one Voegelin excerpt each week. We thank our contributors, editors and advisors who have made this year a success!

NEW

"A Global Madhouse Bursting with Stupendous Vitality"
We are pleased to offer our readers Eric Voegelin's famous Harvard lecture in which he describes the modern loss of spiritual realism and the need for the recovery of  foundational experiences: “And with the seventeenth cen­tury begins the incredible spectaculum of modernity–both fas­cinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and de­pressing, tragic and grotesque–with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow . . .”  Read this week part 1 of “Immortality: Experience and Symbol.”

Wild Justice Served
We welcome the return of Max Arnott to VoegelinView. This week he undertakes an examination of a very popular movie and book. Not to give away anything in advance, we leave it to the reader to make his own discoveries in “True Grit, or, Phronesis and the Happy Ending.”

Survival Outside the Bureaucracies
We present the 6th and last part of the audio recording, the “Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin.” In this final segment Voegelin considers, among other topics, a stark choice that may become necesssary: “ [You may find yourself in a corrupt cultural situation in which] you don’t achieve anything except your own corruption. That is the point at which what you call ‘interiorization’ may become a duty. That would not be a failure of nerve, but an understanding of the true situation. . . . You get bureaucracies as an assimilating force–you may get corrupted.” On the Audio page listen to part 6 of “The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin.”

Defining and Defending America
At this moment of expanding revelations of political corruption at the highest levels of Government we can think of nothing more fitting than to reprise Ellis Sandoz' reflections on what it means to be an American: “The heart of the matter, and its most delicate aspect, is to connect Americanism with the biblical faith of Americans as the chief source of its strength and enduring resilience–and of its frequent arousal of anti-American sentiments from ideologues of every stripe, . . .” Read this week  “Americanism –The Capacity to Resist Ideologues.”

To see what has already appeared at VoegelinView, browse Our Past Headlines