The Calvinist International
Steven D. Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse is one of the most piercing works in political philosophy I’ve read in a long while. Though it’s brief, by the end of it Smith has turned inside out some of the modern Western world’s most repeated fundamental values, and shown that appeals to them are actually […]
One of the most provocatively titled books I have ever come across from a contemporary ethical philosopher is Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. The book’s gist is just as punchy: Since Mill’s seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those […]
It is not surprising that the conservative reaction to the recent Planned Parenthood scandal has been varied. Some are hopeful that these videos will have substantive effects. Others are more cynical. In either case, the footage is iconic– making plain what technocratic medical-speak really sounds like behind closed doors. One could reduce “It’s a baby” […]
There is a sense in which nothing we usually consider to be in the category of adiaphora (food and drink, certainly; but what about politics? economics? that old and tasty red herring, “culture”?), after the resurrection of Christ, can be called “common” any longer. In the economy of God’s reconciling work in Christ, there is […]
Charles Mills Gayley’s book from almost a century ago, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, may prove interesting to some readers of TCI. Two chapters in particular deserve consideration: “Shakespeare and Hooker”, which argues the great playwright was reading the great theologian, and “Richard Hooker and the Principles of American Liberty”, which argues […]