In The Nation, whose basic reigning philosophy is–to the best of our knowledge–rigid dialectical materialism, we find a fine example of how smoothly this allegedly scientific and empirical ideology turns into mystical fideism. One Sidney Lens, an intrepid apologist for any Sovietized thing on earth, writes: Cubans have the highest standard of living in Latin...
Author: The Archive (The Archive)
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A Man Among Mice
Lady Lytton probably summed up the aura of Winston Churchill most effectively when she said, “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” Those who have chronicled Churchill’s life have been liberal about providing a compendium of his faults. Churchill...
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Open—Or Empty?
In the work of Professor Germino’s prime mentor, Eric Voegelin, and that of Hannah Arendt, the subject of Professor Young-Bruehl’s biography, we have the head and the heart of a theory of man that understands politics as phenomenality, as self-disclosure in a space of appearances, originating in the “experiential locus of humanity.” This locus is...
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Faltering Christian Soldiers
Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until...
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At the Abyss
Although a world safe from nuclear destruction is an ideal that all civilized people should pray for, as a practical matter, it is an impossibility. Nuclear weapons exist and will continue to do so until the time that (a) they have been used and so only rubble remains or (b) they have been replaced by...
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Conservative Imagination
Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Cardinal Newman are credited with bringing intriguing imponderables into the syndrome of conservative philosophies. Theirs was, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, “conservatism of imagination,” a rather vague category of cognition and judgment. In fact, Disraeli’s historical image is deceptively coherent, definable, even simple: he’s perceived as an astute statesman, dedicated to...