Peter Lawler

Written by Peter Lawler

Peter Augustine Lawler (1951-2017) was the Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia and editor of the Perspectives on Political Science. He was author of numerous books, the latest being American Heresies and Higher Education (2016).

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So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore.
The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is.
The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He explained that in a modern, sophisticated…

The word “dignity” is not particularly Christian. It has no special significance in the Scriptures and not much history as a theological concept. Only in the twentieth century did moral theologians begin to use it when addressing issues such as abortion, religious liberty, and economic justice. Neither does the word come to us from the classical philosophers such as Plato…

Liberal Education for the Twenty-First Century
So, my title is misleading. The basic content of and case for liberal education didn’t change when we moved from one century to another. I’m not big on century analysis and even less on decade analysis (the Sixties!).
Liberal education is under attack these days in pretty predictable ways. It’s irrelevant, unproductive, too expensive, excessively…