Gilbert Meilaender

Guests on Volume 118: Gilbert Meilaender, on the ethical questions raised by anti-aging research, especially its most extreme forms in the "transhumanist" movement; Ron Highfield, on why the modern assumptions about personal identity, freedom, and human dignity create prejudices against the Gospel's account of God and the self; Mark Mitchell, on why gratitude and stewardship should be seen as fundamental political postures; Daniel M. Bell, Jr., on how capitalism nurtures the assumption of the autonomous self; Helen Rhee, on the centrality of almsgiving to Christian identity in the early Church; and Peter Brown, on how the early Church's wrestling with the questions of wealth and poverty steered a course between radical asceticism and careless indulgence.

Guests on Volume 100: Jennifer Burns, on the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, "goddess of the market" and entrenched enemy of altruism; Christian Smith, on the aimless cultural world of "emerging adulthood" and on how it makes the idea of objective moral order implausible; and Dallas Willard, on why it's important to recover the conviction that religious beliefs involve real knowledge. In honor of the five score milestone, part two of the issue features a look back at the beginnings of the Journal and a few special excerpts of conversations with those early guests, including Peter Kreeft on Lewis, Huxley, and J.F.K. after death; P. D. James, on good and evil in fiction; James Davison Hunter, on culture wars; Paul McHugh, on when psychiatry loses its way; Ted Prescott, on nudity in art and advertising; Ed Knippers, on the powerful presence of the body; Martha Bayles, on pop and perverse modernism; Dominic Aquila, on Christopher Lasch; Gilbert Meilaender, on random kindness; Neil Postman, on technology and culture; and Alan Jacobs, on being maudlin in Madison County.

Guests on Volume 98: Stanley Hauerwas, on the public witness of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and on why Neuhaus abandoned his 1960s radicalism to become a leading "theoconservative"; Clarke Forsythe, on why prudence is a lost political virtue and on why and how the pro-life movement needs to broaden its educational efforts; Gilbert Meilaender, on the necessity of a concept of human dignity and on why Americans no longer seem able to defend it; Jeanne Murray Walker, on how her students learn to understand poetry and on how metaphors are at the heart of poetic expression; Roger Lundin, on how the disenchantment of the world led to new forms of doubt and self-expression; and David Bentley Hart, on the feeble and confused arguments of the recent crop of outspoken atheists and on how a misunderstanding of the nature of freedom is at the heart of their revulsion at religion.

Guests on Volume 85: C. John Sommerville, on how higher education, divorced from higher realities, has become socially irrelevant; Catherine Albanese, on American "metaphysical religion," varieties of gnosticism, and the quest for spiritual energy; Christopher Shannon, on how social scientists encouraged the rise of autonomous individualism in 20th-century America; Michael G. Lawler, on the development of the idea of marriage as covenant in Roman Catholic thought; Gilbert Meilaender, on lessons from Augustine in defining proper expectations for the Christian life; Matthew Dickerson, on J. R. R. Tolkien's vision of stewardship of the earth: the glory of trees and the shepherdhood of ents.

Guests on Volume 52: Tom Shippey, on J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century; Jeffrey Meyers, on George Orwell’s illuminating use of language; Ralph McInerny, on natural theology and the "subjective turn" in philosophy; Daniel Ritchie, on William Cowper and how we know the world; Ian Ker, on John Henry Newman and the purpose of education; Mark Schwehn, on teaching, community, and virtue; Gilbert Meilaender, on ways to think about work; and Tiina Nunnally, on the prose of Sigrid Undset.