Immanentizing Innocence: Identity Politics as Deformed Christianity
American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. Joshua Mitchell. New York: Encounter Books, 2020. On first glance, it may appear that this book…
Saving Superman: A Daunting Lesson from Old Christianity
“The private life is dead”—thus spoke Strelnikov, Pasternak’s infamous prophet of a new “manhood,” in Doctor Zhivago. The private life is supposed to entail a selfishness to…
Monism vs the Trinity
There seems to be some universal tendency to want to find the single underlying thing or principle that unites and explains everything. The person regarded as the…
Revisiting Christopher Dawson on Culture
Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is not an ideology. It is, rather, a powerful hypothesis, to be tested by the…
The Essence of Missionary Christianity
Christopher Dawson has identified Six Ages in the history of the Church. In Dawson’s First Age, we witness a unique encounter of the “Barbarian” East with the…
Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church
Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church exhibit a cyclical pattern in historical events. Each Age exhibits an overall pattern of “rise and fall” during each cycle…
China’s Reforms and Opening-Up: Since 1517
It was AD 1517. In China then, it was the twelfth year of Emperor Zhengde (1491-1521, reign 1505-1521) in the Ming dynasty. According to the traditional Chinese…
René Girard and the Common Good
I argue that Girard’s understanding of the political order is largely in line with Thomistic thinking on the common good. In following Girard in his extrapolations of…
Death to the Death Penalty? René Girard’s Challenge to Thomas Aquinas
The Catholic Church’s recent definitive revocation of the death penalty[1] suggests that something in the zeitgeist demands a rethinking of one strand of conservative thought. Always the…
God – Pictures at an Exhibition
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus…
The Idol of Our Age: Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney at Abigail Adams Institute
Please see Daniel J. Mahoney's lecture, "The Idols of Our Age," at the Abigail Adams Institute, Harvard University. The YouTube link is here.
Hannah Arendt: Philosopher of Politics, History, and Faith
Hannah Arendt’s immigration to the United States in the early 1940s reminds me of a comment made by a professor of a post-WW2 American history course that…
A Bone of Him Shall Not Be Broken
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Tom Holland. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Immediately after Christ’s crucifixion, the Roman soldiers, approaching the condemned thieves beside…
Why the Roman Empire Was an Empire Like No Other
What made the Roman Empire an empire like no other was that it alone was the city that became an empire. Its distinctively republican civic form became…
The Incarnation of Truth and Love
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The gospel of St. John is the most poetic of…
