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…
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…
Grant, Time, and Eternity
Introduction Over the course of his prodigious career, George Grant, on a number of occasions, undertook to rethink both himself and his relationship to philosophy and theology.…
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…
Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul and America’s Soul (Part I)
Hope Amidst Crisis Bob Dylan has only gone and released a new song, his first original music in eight years, right in the heart of the crisis…
Quantum Mechanics and Religion Revisited
At a 1932 conference on quantum mechanics it was suggested that physicists should not worry about what quantum mechanics indicates about the nature of reality and they…
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.
Orthodoxy and the Mob
In Matthew 22:21, Jesus is quoted as saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” in response to…
Confronting Nihilism: Towards a Political Theory of the Psalms
I. In contradistinction to the efforts directed towards reviving modernity, several attempts to recover the older understanding of a common moral order, grounded in a disciplined habit…
Two Kinds of Sacrifice: René Girard’s Analysis of Scapegoating
Mimesis and Scapegoating Humans are intensely mimetic. We learn to talk, walk, and nearly everything else by imitation. But because we also imitate each other’s desires, other…
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…
Rocky: Becoming Man
“Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing…
Rocky: A Theatre for Heroism
‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that…
