The Calvinist International
Some of our friends are arguing about Capitalism and Marxism, so I thought we would do what we usually do– turn to the archives! What did the stuffy dead guys say about this? That’s a big task, though (and one that we have been doing piece by piece over time), and so, true to form, […]
Commenting on Genesis 2:15, John Calvin offers a general philosophy of the goodness of labor and the duties of cultivating the earth. He says that this is a “natural” duty for all men, and he includes the themes of activity, frugality, and legacy. This is often summarized simply as “stewardship.” Calvin explains: And the Lord […]
Allan C. Carlson The Natural Family Where It Belongs: New Agrarian Essays Transaction Publishers, 2014 Allan Carlson is a writer we interact with often at TCI. We have reviewed his Third Ways here and have tried to summarize his overall project here. Earlier this year we were sent a review copy of his newest release, The Natural […]
Distributist economist John Médaille discusses Thomas Piketty’s Capital at Front Porch Republic. He concludes his review, which at points agrees and disagrees with the book, with these words: It is beyond the scope of this review the means by which capital can be made once again to be the servant of production rather than its […]
TCI contributors Drs. Bradford Littlejohn and Jordan Ballor have begun an online conversation about the ethical and political considerations surrounding the “living wage.” Dr. Littlejohn began things on his blog here, and Dr. Ballor has written a response here. These contributions are well worth the time of serious reflection, as they highlight the difficult challenges […]
Robert L. Dabney is known, to those who know him, as the grey eminence of an old and lost form of Presbyterianism. To call him “Old School” might be an understatement, as Dr. Dabney wrote against the incipient public school movement, women’s rights, and most infamously of all, abolition and the US Civil War. Dr. […]
The Center for a Stateless Society, a self-proclaimed “Left Wing Anarchist Think Tank & Media Center,” quotes writer Kevin Carson on what is dubbed “conflationism” or “vulgar libertarianism”: Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re […]
John Médaille writes in a Facebook comment: First Things is conservative in the abstract but liberal in application. The quintessential First Things view is an article they ran title[d] “Waiting for St. V[la]dimir” (as in Vladimir Lenin), which was an ignorant and gratuitous attack on Alasdair MacIntyre. The author’s objection was th[at] MacIntyre attacked capitalism, which […]
Part of what made me want to publish a review of an older book like Allan Carlson’s Third Ways is that it seems as if a number of conservatives are making known their desires to break with the unhelpful Left/Right political bifurcation. A few years back James Matthew Wilson wrote his “Letter from a Traditional Conservative” at Front […]
Third Ways is not a new release. It has been out for nearly six years now, but it still seems relevant and even forward-looking. The news has had several recent discussions about the question of child-bearing and child-rearing. And of course, no one seems to be satisfied with the current Left Wing / Right Wing divide […]