Tag Archives: United States

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Democracy, Language, And Rhetoric1
“Democracy, Language, and Rhetoric” is a legitimate and important topic. However, upon confronting it, one initially encounters at least three formidable complexes of questions. Here’s an inventory of the issues that I see:
First, what do we want to learn about rhetoric and language in democracies? Are we inquiring what democratic rhetoric is? Are we curious about the…

Tucked away in the House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts—the massive overhaul of the U.S. tax system that has just passed the Senate and is now one its way to committee, where Congress will attempt to reconcile the two versions of the bill—is a provision that would make tuition benefits that graduate students receive taxable. Many have…

The study of history is a rigorous intellectual enterprise.  A student researching and writing about the past must sift through multiple pieces of evidence, grasp an event’s larger context, and think logically in order to construct arguments presenting plausible explanations as well as judgments and interpretations.   But history is also an imaginative endeavor as practitioners of the discipline must oftentimes…
Trepanier LDS in USA Mormon

To those unfamiliar with the faith, it appears that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is enjoying a moment of fame in American culture: the 2011 musical, The Book of Mormon, received nine Tony Awards and original Broadway cast recording became the highest-charting Broadway cast album in over four decades; Mitt Romney was the Republican nomination for the…

The portrayals of the Mormon family in popular culture are schizophrenic: it is either a prosperous and proud, self-congratulatory nuclear family or a secretive cult in which the husbands lead double lives of public monogamy and private polygamy.1 This dual representation reflects the complex history of marriage in Mormonism as well as the challenge that Mormonism has posed to the…

In recent years, Mormonism has been the focus of unprecedented media interest. What some have called “The Mormon Moment,” spurred by Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and an increased public relations effort by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or, more commonly, the LDS Church) itself, has resulted in significant screen-time for a religion which previously seemed to…

Give Me Liberty: Studies in Constitutionalism and Philosophy. Ellis Sandoz. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013.
 
Ellis Sandoz’s Give Me Liberty: Studies in Constitutionalism and Philosophy is a collection of nine essays: four about American history and politics, four about the philosophy of Eric Voegelin, and a concluding essay about liberty. Two of the essays have been previously published elsewhere – one about…

Sinclair Lewis had an ambivalent relationship with America. His Midwestern upbringing perfectly situated him to understand the American experiment, but he found it wanting in many ways. His take on the United States was captured during a 1930 radio interview he gave while in Berlin: “Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than…
Poland US

With the declassification of secret material after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, scholars are able to determine how accurate were the perceptions of foreign policy-makers to the reality which they were analyzing. This chapter will explore the accuracy of the perceptions of the American foreign policy establishment – the White House, the State Department, and…
United States America Russia Soviet Union Cold War

Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and former Soviet republics became sovereign states. Since that time Ukraine started its own policy, with the Ukrainian point of view on history, international relations, and politics differing greatly from the Russian perspective. But during the Cold War period Ukraine was also a part of the USSR, which…