Can Evangelicals Fill John Stott's Shoes?

Posted: Monday, November 14, 2011
A reflection on the legacy of the late Rev. John Stott and what his legacy means for the future of worldwide evangelicalism.  [Full Story]

A Discipline in Denial

Posted: Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The field of "political science" could benefit from embracing "science" less intently and should instead seek to recover its identity as a discipline rooted in canonical works, such as Aristotle's "Politics," that combine empirical observation with moral and philosophical reflection.  [Full Story]

The Obama Dilemma

Posted: Sunday, November 2, 2008
The evangelical left is justified in seeing itself in continuity with the reform history of evangelicalism. But so is the evangelical right, which takes so many of its political bearings from the abortion issue.  [Full Story]

The Burden of the Humanities

Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008
The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.  [Full Story]

Remarks on the Anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's Birth

Posted: Thursday, April 24, 2008
Perhaps, in the past, we have been too prone to place our forebears on a pedestal. But it is far worse, to feel compelled always to cut the storied past down to the size of the tabloid present. Perhaps the time has come for that to change. Perhaps we are wise enough now, to know that imperfect heroes are the only kind there ever are, or can be.  [Full Story]

Birthday of a Preacher Man
Elmer Gantry turns 80.
Posted: Friday, January 4, 2008
You probably didn't notice it, but that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year. A surprising thought, perhaps, given what a fixture Sinclair Lewis's 1927 fictional portrait of a bogus and amoral itinerant Midwestern preacher has become in both our speech and our imaginations. Was there really a time when we didn't have Elmer to kick around--or to kick others with?  [Full Story]

Prof in a Box
A mail-order company gives us a second chance for education.
Posted: Friday, August 24, 2007
As the generations of post-1960s college graduates grow older, they will come to understand that their expensive formal education, with its trendiness and lack of breadth or rigor or enduring substance, quite simply failed them -- by failing to connect them to the riches of their own civilization.  [Full Story]

Twilight of Sociology

Posted: Wednesday, February 7, 2007
If sociology can somehow tame its misguided activist zeal -- if it can reclaim a supple awareness of the hard and permanent things -- it may gain back some of its lost status. Tocqueville believed that the great task facing modernity is not to erase the past and "reconstruct" the present but to recognize what was best in the past -- what was essential -- and to carry it forward.  [Full Story]

Is Conservatism Finished?

Posted: Thursday, January 4, 2007
Even before November's midterm elections and the Republican party's loss of its congressional majorities, there was widespread talk of the exhaustion, even death, of conservatism in America. But nothing about the GOP losses justifies the claim that conservatism lost, or that the slow movement of the American electorate to the center-Right of the political spectrum has stopped or even diminished, let alone reversed.  [Full Story]

Yes, There Are Two Americas

Posted: Saturday, December 23, 2006
If Mr. Brooks is right, our era's common sense of the matter -- that the political left is more compassionate than the political right -- is demonstrably inaccurate. In fact, Sen. John Edwards's repeated claim that there are "two Americas" turns out to be correct but misstated: The line of separation runs most saliently not between the haves and have-nots but between the gives and the give-nots.  [Full Story]