Modern Age articles from September 2006

Modern Age archives from September 2006

Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the moral resources of democracy.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... AT A TIME WHEN the faith and liberty of free men everywhere are challenged by anti-Americanism and the ruthless fanaticism of foreign enemies, public discourse reconsiders the moral underpinnings of democracy and reform movements across...

Christianity, Enlightenment liberalism, and the quest for freedom.(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... The profoundest and most wideseeing minds of Greece and Rome never managed to grasp... the likeness of all men and... the equal right of all to liberty.... Jesus Christ had to come down to earth to make all members of the human...

Theological reflections on Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... ROBERT PENN WARREN'S novel of southern politics is far more than a political novel. It is a profound meditation on human nature. It is a novel populated by seekers, each with a longing, each with a desire for significance, each struggling to...

Barrett Wendell: New England orderly idealist.(American intellectual)
September 22, 2006... THE OBSCURITY OF INTELLECTUALS comes in two basic varieties: justifiable and unjustifiable. The former are trapped in the contexts of their own times, whose ideas cease to resonate far after their deaths. The grave is the end and they are...

A plea for humanistic education.(trends in the American public education system)(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2006... IN ONE OF THE LAST THINGS he wrote before he died in 1961, Carl Jung worried about the likelihood that America would succumb to a "collectivist belief." This would occur because of our "materialist and collectivist" character and our lack of a...

In the airport.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... In the airport He's the guy tapping, Tapping on a terminal Table, staring out of A concourse window, His eyelashes wet. I guess she left Him. I don't know. I didn't see her leave. In the airport He's the guy laughing,...

Leon Roth: a philosopher-teacher.(GREAT TEACHERS IN OUR LIVES)(Personal account)
September 22, 2006... DURING MY SCHOOL-YEARS--from kindergarten through university--I had many teachers. They were mostly very good teachers--often dedicated to their vocation beyond and above formal instruction in their specific subjects. Out of the many, two were...

Sartre and Camus: the yoke of enlightenment.(Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre)(Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, [interviews conducted with Sartre by Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser, Quintin Hoare, and Simone de Beauvoir], London and New York: Seagull Books/Berg Publishers, 2006. 114 pp. Camus at Combat: Writing...

Twilight of an idol?(Plato's Republic: A Study)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Plato's Republic: A Study, by Stanley Rosen, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 432 pp. FOR STUDENTS POSSESSED of searching intelligence, one of the powerful attractions of the Straussian teaching is its willingness, not to say its...

Recovering the holy.(Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, by Roger Scruton, London and New York: Continuum International, 2006. 256 pp. ROGER VERNON SCRUTON is standing at night in a quiet street in Prague, listening. It is the early 1980s, well before the...

Dead Duce walking.(The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, by Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. 258 pp. ONE CURIOUS, seldom-noticed interaction between Italian and American...

Living the questions.(Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas)(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels, New York: Random House, 2003. 242 pp. MY WIFE AND I belong to a Christian Family Movement group associated with a parish that straddles the Maryland/D.C. line. When the group...

Tea with the apostles.(Poem)
September 22, 2006... We kissed goodbye. She somehow already knew About the nearing blight, Was whispering of leaves, and how they only turn In the secrecy of night. "The spider, giving in birth, must die," she wept, Watching a stray leaf fall, And...

Justice Scalia as judicial statesman.(COMMENTS)(Antonic Scalia)
September 22, 2006... OF ALL THE MAXIMS of Chief Justice John Marshall, perhaps the most misleading is this: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Read literally, the maxim amounts to a mere tautology, for to...

Revisiting Nikolai Berdyaev.(Russian philosopher)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... TRANSACTION PUBLISHERS has performed an important service in recently reissuing Nikolai Berdyaev's The Meaning of History: An Essay on the Philosophy of Human Destiny, which appeared in an English translation in 1936. The Russian title, Smysl...