Modern Age articles from January 2005

Modern Age archives from January 2005

North Wind.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... When wagons cart gold sheaves from autumn's fields And wounded apples bleed under stark boughs Of trees white winter severed from their yields, Cold farmers in warm barns stack up their ploughs. Aeolus, King of Winds, draws a deep breath...

Where have the readers gone?(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... OF LATE WE HAVE BEEN READING and hearing much about the decline in reading abilities and interests among the student population, including even graduates of high schools and, one might add, of institutions of higher learning. We are rightly...

Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, and the moral imagination.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... The editors of Modern Age are pleased to publish this essay in honor of the memory of Russell Amos Kirk, who died on April 29, 1994. I IN THE SUMMER of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I...

Harold Bloom: the critic as Gnostic.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... A CHRISTIAN CRITIC confronting the work of Professor Harold Bloom may well find himself in a frame of mind analogous to the apostle, St. John: "Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, who followeth not us; and we forbade him" (Mk. 9....

Philosophers for the city: Aristotle and the telos of education.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... THE LIFE DEDICATED to intellectual pursuits is commonly understood as rarefied and prohibitively esoteric--a life suited to the few rather than the many. Often referred to as the contemplative life, it is associated with images of monastic...

Civil theology in the Gnostic age: progress and regress.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... ONE OF ERIC VOEGELIN's most trenchant apercus is his observation that Gnosticism, which he considered modernity's core, is fundamentally a flight from the universally human "horror of existence," (1) by which he meant, I believe, the horror not...

Flannery O'Connor's writing: a guide for the perplexed.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... MANY READERS HAVE BEEN fascinated with Flannery O'Connor as a person and author, perhaps for some of the same reasons I find her so engaging. I wish to mention briefly four minor but not insignificant features that attract me and then focus on...

Walker Percy and suicide.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... IT HAS NOW COME TO PASS in American secular culture that the choice to end one's own life--suicide--is tacitly accepted as an inalienable right of every person. Although the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and...

Jerusalem and Athens.(The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis)(Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, by Leon Kass, New York: Free Press, 2003. 700 pp. Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, by Thomas Pangle, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 285 pp. ALTHOUGH THESE BOOKS...

The need for self-scrutiny.(The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right)(Conservatism in America Since 1930)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right, edited by Joseph Scotchie, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999. 212 pp. Conservatism in America Since 1930, edited by Gregory L. Schneider, New York: New York University...

Vico or Nietzsche?(Vico: Genealogist of Modernity)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Vico: Genealogist of Modernity, by Robert C. Miner, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. 232 pp. WHEN GIAMBATTISTA VICO died in 1744, his funeral degenerated into a public controversy as the faculty of the University of Naples,...

Rethinking East German education.(Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995, by John Rodden. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxix + 506 pp. THE FIRST PART OF THIS loosely structured book covers the years 1945-1989...

Reverence for the eternal.(Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality, by John M. Rist, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 304 pp. REAL ETHICS is a hard-hitting critique of contemporary moral theory from a realist point of view by John M. Rist,...

Truth.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Distant and beautiful and pure, Their pale light provides illusive Enchantment to earth. But gazing Up at them makes us undeceived.

Idealism and realism in politics: a response to Richard J. Bishirjian's "Origins and End of the New World Order".(COMMENT)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... And the world was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep... And God said, Let there be light: And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.... --Genesis 1:2-4 THE OPENING...

Protecting the environment.(COMMENT)
January 1, 2005... I WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT on the subject raised by Professor John R.E. Bliese in a past issue of Modern Age. The theme of the article, "Taking the Lead in Environmentalism," is that conservatives should "come to terms with environmentalism and...