The Calvinist International
My recent essay on the extant tensions between political liberalism and Christianity, published in the October issue of the Australian cultural and political journal Quadrant, is now available online. In it, I attempt to demonstrate the historical links between Christianity and liberalism, vis-a-vis Larry Siedentop. The article is also my effort to persuade a secular audience about the necessity […]
In his stimulating The Pretenses of Loyalty, John Perry conveys a seminal moment in John Rawls’ life from autobiographical comments: To the extent that Christianity is taken seriously, I came to think it could have deleterious effects on one’s character. Christianity is a solitary religion: each is saved or damned individually, and we naturally focus […]
Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 2014, 434 pp + viii. At the very beginning of Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop laments in terms that will resonate with many. Many goods of the past are lost. The western world, taken as a whole, has mislaid its cultural and historical identity. […]
In a thoughtful and honest article at Reformation500 Stephen Wolfe suggests that in my work Reformed social ethics has taken a “social egalitarian turn.” Wolfe is responding to my series of articles on Presbyterians and Race at Reformation 21. He specifically highlights this claim that I made: The real problem was the interpretation of the […]
The Obergefell decision has been understandably generating tremendous media coverage and analysis. Most of the commentary has discussed either the speed at which society has given approval to same-sex marriages or the potentially dramatic “legal overreach” by the judiciary. One very foundational point, however, has gone nearly without comment: the legal jurisdiction of the family. In the […]
The terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo bring into sharp relief a major contradiction in the intellectual framework of modern democracy. In fact, it highlights a fault line. Freedom of speech is one of the supposedly unshakeable pillars of liberal social order. But the way liberals have dealt with the issue brings into […]
From TS Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society: That liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, […]
Assuming the rightness of the critique provided by anti-revolutionary thinkers such as Groen van Prinsterer, what then should be the result? Obviously, by the nature of the case, Christians, being anti-revolutionaries (whether Rousseauian or Jeffersonian: the difference is not as great as one might think), cannot resort to outright revolution. The social order informed, indeed […]
Having given his name to an international theological and political movement, indeed an ism, it is perhaps surprising to learn that Abraham Kuyper is not more widely read outside of Dutch-speaking audiences. Of the North American followers claiming his name, relatively few have read any of Kuyper’s works outside of the Stone Lectures. A significant minority […]
Mr. J. L. Leidl has written a worthy salvo at Ethika Politika in the ongoing debate about American liberalism and the politics of virtue. Near the end of his piece he addresses the question of what a eudaimonist can do in a pervasively liberal society. He rightly dismisses three options: MacIntyrean withdrawal, a pragmatic acceptance […]