“With the same cement, ever sure to bind, We bring to one dead level ev’ry mind.” -Alexander Pope John Dewey: Types of Thinking; Philosophical Library; New York. William C. Ringenberg: The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America; Christian University Press/William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, ML As easy as...
Science Fiction in America, 1870’s-1930’s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources by Thomas D. Clareson; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Although the first entry is Flatland and the final is Zamitan’s We, the second and the penultimate are more telling: number two, The Man With the Broken Ear, includes a character who believes that “humans are...
“Millions endeavoring to supply Each other’s lust and vanity.” – Bernard Mandeville Milton and Rose Friedman: The Tyranny of the Status Quo; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. Amitai Etzioni: Capital Corruption; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. It is a commonplace that modern democracy suffers from a grave malady, namely...
“A steady Patriot of the World alone, The friend of every country — but his own.” -George Canning John Crewdson: The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America; Times Books; New York. Victor Ripp: Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigres; Little, Brown; Boston. Lewis A. Coser:...
“Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens Gloria Teucrorum. “ (We once were Trojans, there once was Troy, and the vast glory of the Teucrian race.) -Vergil Peter Ackroyd: T. S. Eliot: A Life; Simon & Schuster; New York. “Ackroyd’s is the most comprehensive full-length critical biography we have of this almost talismanic figure of literary...
When I first came to these shores, almost 20 years ago, an escapee from communism’s lethal embrace, a sort of antiwar was raging here. I felt betrayed. As anyone who lived under the most intricate tyranny of mind and body, I believed it every free man’s sacrosanct duty to combat communism’s reptile stranglehold on truth...
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
Nature imitates art: so Oscar Wilde instructs us. Whether or not natural sunsets imitate Turner’s painted sunsets, surely human nature is developed by human arts. “Art is man’s nature,” in Burke’s phrase: modeling ourselves upon the noble creations of the great writer and the great painter, we become fully human by emulation of the artist’s...
Saccharin Sobs Places in the Heart; Written and Directed by Robert Benton; Tri-Star Pictures. by Stephen Macauley Robert Benton is the man behind Still of the Night and Kramer vs. Kramer. Places in the Heart, his latest film, is set in a small Texas town during the Depression. The subject—like Kramer vs. Kramer—is separation, but this...
The United States is a great country, as everyone knows. This is why America has many friends, among whom one must also take account of its less amiable, jealous friends. One must not forget that America saved France in 1918 with the disembarkation for the second battle of the Marne and saved Europe from the...
From Dewey to Huey To a superficial observer, philosophers seem like people who inconsequentially spin their idle theories in their ivory towers while the real world blithely goes its own way. The truth is otherwise. Aristotelian thought refurbished and re shaped by medieval Thomists, for centuries governed life in Western Europe far more pervasively...
The world is in its present condition (and many suspect that this state is much worse than before, even if “before” may mean only in our own individual memory) because of ideas. Three of those ideas can be credited to three historical figures: Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. Marx came to the conclusion that human economic...
A Gloaming Raymond Aron: The Committed Observer; Interviews with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. On 17 October 1983, thelight in the world of the intellect and action became dimmed with the passing of critic, scholar, thinker, teacher, journalist Raymond Aron. Aron, of course, left much behind him—40 books, enlightened students, journalism, lectures,...
Church ± StatenA DIALOGUEnThe Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in AmericanRichard John Neuhaus: The NakednPublic Square: Religion andnDemocracy in America; Wm. B.nEerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI.nJames Hitchcock is professor of historynat St. Louis University. His latestnbook is The Pope and the Jesuits,npublished by the National Committeenof Catholic Laymen.nGeorge M. Marsden is professor ofnhistory at Calvin...
Goodbye, Peter Pan The Big Chill; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan It is unique in that it has something for virtually everyone to hate. Consider the characters, all eight. They are the types of people that our parents warned us about in the late 60’s and early 70’s: not the drug pushers who lurked behind bushes,...