Scruton, looking at our days “sub specie aeternitatis,” even thinks that this time of decay gives us an opportunity to work on the behalf of religion, morality, and culture that “no previous generation has been granted, and which no future generation may desire.”

Julian Kwasniewski reviews Against the Tide

Philosophy does not point toward an abstract transhistorical truth for humanity, but rather to a murky, historically contingent truth… the truth of historical and material conditions.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer’s Discontinuity with the Ancients

It is only through the practice of an explicitly critical philosophy that a wholly stagnant self-affirming social order can be avoided.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer critical theory and the meaning of philosophy

For Horkheimer, his method of critical theory, are the truest continuation of the initial philosophic project of the Western tradition.

Joseph Natali on Max Horkheimer and the critical role of Socrates

The political is a lived medium through which we gain insight into the theological concepts that inform the political as one human hierarchy amongst others (economic, social, and so on).

Ali Harfouch on recovering the political through political theology.

Past writers have updated Arthur for new audiences without sacrificing his essential kingship. If that's possible for Arthur, it should be possible for Charles and the British monarchy.

—Gabriel Schenk on what King Charles can learn from King Arthur.

Reading her poetry, one follows Pinkerton’s journey away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith.

Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Helen Pinkerton’s poems

We are witnessing a dehumanization of society driven by a covert, reductionist ideology. We need a return to a non-reductionist anthropology, rooted in classical conceptions of the human good.

Xavier Symons on public health, COVID, and Kheriaty’s ‘The New Abnormal’

Virtue is a matter of acting correctly according to whatever circumstances arise. The state which legislates the need to choose out of existence legislates virtue out of existence.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on Brave New World and the 80 Years’ War for Virtue

In telling a story that accounts for sovereignty, we can think through the possibility of a politics without sovereignty and the implications that such a politics would have on liberatory politics

Ali S. Harfouch on modernity, Islam, and second creators

Machiavelli follows Augustine by demythologizing violence, stripping it of the gloss of legend and heroism. He departs from him by adding that it is necessary, excusable, and worthy of imitation.

Brian Harding on violence and political reality

Religion, and the apocalyptic motifs of the Christian Gospels, is that which alone can send us back into the world with a renewed strength for political engagement and activism.

Tim Howles on the eschatological roots of political renewal

Only a dialectical approach between the Enlightenment and Christianity is capable of grasping the historical dynamics of the emergence of human rights within the European context.

Sharon Kuruvilla reviews Hans Joas’s The Sacredness of the Person

There are many roads to modern liberty, but some focus not on the triumphant will but on the richness of the person and our commitments to one another.

Fred Bauer on an off-liberalism marked by care, duty, and solidarity rather than autonomy

Rather than being merely anti-liberal or anti-postliberal, the off-liberal reveals (and perhaps revels in) the heterogeneity of sources for the so-called “liberal” order.

Fred Bauer on developing an off-liberal approach to modern political predicaments

Abjuring the legacy of utopianism distances us from one of the prime affective and intellectual forces motivating such modern ideals as popular sovereignty, human rights, and social progress.

Daniel Cunningham on the need for utopias

The self exists to be true to itself, and it can only be so insofar as it sloughs off the heteronomous influences of society. The unhappy result is that “we are all expressive individuals now.”

James Matthew Wilson reviews Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

The body politic metaphor became proof that the immigrant and the dependent were biologically incompatible with the rest of society. The community that grew out of this interpretation shaped itself in strange, unsettling, and inhumane ways.

G. Marie Aquilina traces the history of eugenics as a distortion of the body politic

The turn toward the body had three important effects on modern political philosophy: it naturalized security, individualized liberty, and privatized property.

Emily Davis reviews Birth of the State by Charlotte Epstein

The politics of nostalgia looks to translates the past into a near-future that is utterly inhospitable to it. It is about using the past-that-never-was to build a future-that-never-could-be.

Andrew Latham reads Dante’s Monarchia and Xi Jinping’s China Dream together.