Stanley Hauerwas on the modern idea of freedom
Stanley Hauerwas: “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.”
Faith of our fathers
Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity argues that Jeffersonian and Jacksonian visions of human flourishing stamped American Christianity with an individualistic character that fundamentally shaped the American Church and its message.
Who strangled God?
James Turner examines the ways in which the pursuit of “relevant” theology helped to make atheism plausible in Western culture
Reducing Enlightenment glare
Colin Gunton on the alienation advanced by the Enlightenment
With enemies like this . . .
Terry Eagleton presents a blistering dismissal of arguments made by celebrity atheists
Before and after economics
Mark Mitchell: “The ideology of economics is a way of seeing the world. It forces reality into a preconceived structure and subsequently deigns to rule this truncated world with all the authority of science.”
Digital equality and the untuning of the world
Lee Siegel analyzes how web-based pursuits of unique identity is so unbounded that personal definition becomes impossible.
A devilish temptation
Wendell Berry explains how the modern Western ideal of the sovereign self enshrines a story of the abandonment of restrictions and restraints in the name of human freedom.
Liberalism and limits
On his blog, What I Saw in America, political theorist Patrick Deneen often questions some of the fundamental assumptions of classic liberalism, assumptions which contradict the wisdom of premodern political thinkers.
A culture of one
Andrew Keen argues that the survival of the very best forms of cultural expression, in journalism, music, fiction, and other disciplines, requires a network of mediation and accreditation.