Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation
Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation. Daniel Philpott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Should war criminal be granted amnesty if their assent is…
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…
Politics as Prelest—An Orthodox Christian Meditation on Our Current State of Political Disorder
The word Ideology is a neologism coined by Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, Comte de Tracy. Tracy was a materialist who argued that ideas are formed by physical…
Reformations. The Early Modern World, 1450-1650
Reformations. The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Carlos M. N. Eire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Reformation is a retelling of this epochal change in western…
The Reformation: A History
The Reformation: A History. Diarmaid MacCulloch. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. The word “Protestant” was originally related to a specific occasion in 1529 when at the…
Christ and the Kingdoms of Men: Foundations of Political Life
Christ and the Kingdoms of Men: Foundations of Political Life. David C. Innes. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2019. While the modern state is only around…
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…
Reviving the Teaching Office: Moses, Paul, Wesley, and Reverend Wallace
You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you…
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel. Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Despite the contemporary trend to…
Review of Religion in the Public Square
Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell. James M. Patterson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Patrick Deneen’s provocative book, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale, 2018), argues…
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…
