Modern Age articles from September 2008

Modern Age archives from September 2008

Conservatism and the political order.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... As we prepare this final issue of the 2008 volume of Modern Age for the press, a long, arduous, and often rather bizarre presidential campaign is drawing to a close, and its outcome will be known by the time the issue is in print. No matter...

Fighting Bob vs. Silent Cal: the conservative tradition from La Follette to Taft and beyond.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Soon after becoming president in 1981, Ronald Reagan surprised the press by removing the hallowed portrait of Harry Truman from the wall of the White House Cabinet Room and replacing it with one of Calvin Coolidge. The Great Communicator's...

Mark Royden Winchell.(In memoriam)
September 22, 2008... Those of us who valued Mark Winchell's friendship and good company share in the grief of his wife and two sons. We too will miss him. A victim of cancer at the age of fifty-nine, he was one of those people who should live to be a hundred, not...

In epitaph.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Leaning through silence to a dead man's mind --Dick Davis Rev. 21:23 1. Biographer: A Life He sits amid the facts he's gathered in From interviews, books, archives, scattered prose Mastered at last so recollection's pen...

Human freedom and the limitations of scientific determinism.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Recent developments in science have stimulated the centuries-old debate between proponents of determinism and those who defend human freedom. Determinism implies that every event, including every human action, is causally necessitated by prior...

Vachel Lindsay's covenant with America.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... On December 5, 1931, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay died in the upstairs bedroom that he had occupied as a child, having committed suicide by the horrific means of ingesting Lysol. In hindsight, the tragedy--and the slide into depression and paranoia...

Eric Voegelin on the incarnate Christ.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... In his 1965 Ingersoll Lecture "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" Eric Voegelin declared that "the symbolism of incarnation would express the experience, with a date in history, of God reaching into man and revealing him as the Presence that...

On climate change.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... When I first became interested in the applications of nuclear physics I was most concerned by the coming shortage of energy. Since then it has become clear that this is not the main problem. There is plenty of energy for the next few hundred...

Missa in Tempore Belli.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... sursum corda By noon the Mall awaits, though sad Isaiah warned of orphans made and widows scorned... the war we wanted disappoints Gas prices stalled last week, so squat new SUVs ascend the crumbling...

Driving east after Rita.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Last chance for gas west of Beaumont, four tired state troopers mind the cue- no panic here, a strict cortege. The Pac-N-Go suggests Kirkut, but this Exxon was scarcely grazed-- some tumbled signs, wind-dropped debris. ...

Monteagle farmer.(Poem)
September 22, 2008... An angus herd and one white cross-breed cow Fill up the shadow of a single oak, And, since it hasn't rained in over a month, They almost disappear in heat and steam That wavers upward from their salty hides. The farmer passes them...

A real education reformer.(Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik by Chester E. Finn, Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2008). 364 pp. Chester Finn has written an absorbing book of great importance about American K-12 education over the last...

Correcting taste.(Counterpoints: Twenty-five Years of the New Criterion on Culture and the Arts)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Counterpoints: Twenty-five Years of the New Criterion on Culture and the Arts edited with an Introduction by Roger Kimball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). xii + 500 pp. From 1922-39, T. S. Eliot edited a magazine from London, which he called...

Redefining America.(Ain't My America: The Long Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism )(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Ain't My America: The Long Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism by Bill Kauffman (New York: Henry Holt, 2008). 268 pp. Readers will find this work witty, informative, humorous, and irreverent....

The idea of the university, again.(The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs), by Gordon Graham (Charlottesville, VA and Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005). 295 pp. With something of...

Micrographia.(Locke: A Biography)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 528 pp. The early Fellows of the Royal Society of London felt themselves to have embarked upon a high adventure. Their motto, Nullius in verba, would...

Effortless cosmopolitanism.(Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World, by Mark Kroll (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). 503 pp. Had opinion polls existed in 1820, they would have ranked Johann Nepomuk Hummel alongside Beethoven, Weber, and Rossini as among...

Christianity reconsidered.('Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War', 'Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror')(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2005). 530 pp. Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on...

Darwin in the English Department.(Darwin Loves You)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Darwin Loves You by George Levine (Princeton University Press, 2006). xxiii + 304 pp. It is a bit difficult to classify this book. It is not science, philosophy, intellectual history, or literature. Ostensibly the book is about Darwin's...

Europe's Asian Country.(Russia and Asia: Nomadic and Oriental Traditions in Russian History)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Russia & Asia: Nomadic & Oriental Traditions in Russian History by Edgar Knobloch (Hong Kong: Odyssey Books & Guides, 2007). This book is important not because of profound ideas or new, unknown data but because it could be placed in the...