Learning’s Legal Spirit: Montesquieu on Education as the Study of Law
The history of political philosophy is the history of education. Its content, its prospects, its goals—all receive copious attention, from Plato’s Republic to the Scholastics, from Locke and Rousseau to Nietzsche and Rawls. For education is a central concern to any political community, doing much to form the character,…
Modernity, Friendship, and the Purpose of Liberal Education
Thank-you Professor Cheng, the Lingnan University Office of Global Education, and the sponsors of this conference for inviting me to join you at this crucially important conference in this beautiful hotel. It is a great honour to come all the way from Canada to speak to you today. The…
How to Recover China’s Censored Reality
Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China. Li Ma and Jin Li. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock Publishers), 2017. For people whose country is known for censorship and self-censorship, writing in a foreign language is like taking refuge in…
Varieties of Chinese Nationalisms and Their Implications on Religions
Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies. Cheng-tian Kuo, ed. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. A Varieties of Chinese Nationalisms and Their Implications on Religions This volume is a collection of papers discussing “the origin, development, content, and implications of religion-state relations” in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (10).…
Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Dalian Labor Camp with Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out the eleven-year sentence he received in 2009 for his role in the Charter 08 movement that modeled itself after the Charter 68…
As part of The Landmark Series, The Landmark Julius Caesar is another brilliant presentation of primary sources combined with a collection of maps, pictures, and notes to make ancient works navigable to new readers. The accounts in this edition – the Gallic War,…
Born around 45 AD, Pluatrch (later Romanized as Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus) grew up and spent most of his life in Chaeronea where he actively participated in local political and religious affairs.…
Crisis and Constitutionalism is an extraordinary book that recounts the Roman tradition of constitutionalism: 1) rules that were considered entrenched; 2) rules that were of great importance through which political power was exercised; 3) rules that betrayed…
“Strauss embraced classical philosophy over religious faith, not as a system of set doctrines, but as a ‘way of life’ following the model of Socrates, featuring a Socratic ignorance and a searching (zetetic) or erotic skepticism. In this view, the philosopher lives happily with merely…
Pursuits of Wisdom examines six widely diverging individual ethical philosophies in the continuous tradition from Socrates to Plotinus. Each philosophy is a study of what constitutes a good or bad moral character as articulated by Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics,…
The craft of monasticism is to make prayer continuously based on the reading and recollection of sacred texts. This practice of mneme theou, “the meaning of God,” requires a memory that includes cognition, emotion, and imagination in the activity of recollection. In…
This anthology examines the medieval craft of memory: how we recollect or “see again” our past experiences in a process that includes thought and will. Memory consequently is both passive and active, the storage of our past…
- Giorgio Agamben
In my opinion, Giorgio Agamben is the most important contemporary European theorist. Political theology in the anarchist tradition, to which Agamben subscribes, has for its goal the exorcism of theology from political economy.
Though Agamben is a leftist, his argument is in the spirit of Eric Voegelin –…
The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science examines the political community as Aristotelian regimes rather than the Machiavellian state. For Aristotle, the regime is the political community that emerges out of discrete and heterogeneous parts, like the households, while the state for…
Learning’s Legal Spirit: Montesquieu on Education as the Study of Law 
The Life of the Scholar 
The Use of Force 
“A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States 
The Collected Works: The Drama of Humanity (Volume 33) 
Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher 
New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism 
What is a Miracle? 
What Enlightenment, Exactly? 
God is Not Just the Good, as Plato Claimed But Love 
Modernity, Friendship, and the Purpose of Liberal Education 
How to Recover China’s Censored Reality 
Varieties of Chinese Nationalisms and Their Implications on Religions 
Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Dalian Labor Camp with Liu Xiaobo 
Our Passions Forge Our Fetters: The Ballad of Star-Lord 
A Guide to Understanding Eric Voegelin’s Political Reality 
Socrates and Divine Revelation 
What Is Human Dignity? 
Happiness, Subjectivism, and Subjectivity 
Huntington, Kuhn, and Toynbee: Analyzing and Critiquing the Relativism Underpinning the Clash of Civilizations Thesis