Humanitas articles from March 22 2006

Humanitas archives from March 22 2006

American culture: a story.(Essay)
March 22, 2006... My goal in this essay is less to impart a specific teaching than to tell a story. This story, I first should point out, is not a myth made up for didactic purposes, as so many such stories tend to be. It is rather a true story, one rooted in...

Burke's higher romanticism: politics and the sublime.
March 22, 2006... Introduction Both Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be grouped among the key thinkers of the eighteenth century. They are widely understood to be quite different from one another, and their outlooks--especially their...

Peter Viereck (1916-2006).(Obituary)
March 22, 2006... Peter Viereck was born in New York City in 1916. He died on May 13, 2006, at the age of 89 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in the same house on the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus where he and his family had lived since he started...

My Ninetieth Year.(Poem)
March 22, 2006... Slower, great wheel of our circus Of Barnum-and-Moriturus, Sink lower slower. Green is calling, "Stay, stay"; Gray calling, "Sink away." At wheel's deep dip, in order to allay What can't be stopped, this gray, Make one plus one...

Gate.(Poem)
March 22, 2006... Is there an eastward western gate? The wind so sways the grasses They seem to be waving goodbye From the horizontal door. That door's a grave. Just now they seem to be waving (It's Easter) goodbye hello. August 2005

The legacy of Peter Viereck: his prose writings.
March 22, 2006... Much of Peter Viereck's prose writing was framed as an attempt to define a proper conservatism for our time. In 1950 when he published Conservatism Revisited the ideas in vogue among American intellectuals were those of socialism and...

Irving Babbitt, the moral imagination, and progressive education.
March 22, 2006... When Literature and the American College, Irving Babbitt's critique of the new educational theories, was first published in 1908, it was a shot fired across the bow of the ship of progressive reform in American higher education. Babbitt fired a...

Joseph Conrad's moral imagination.(Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005. 165 pp. $35 cloth. This study of Joseph Conrad is welcome both for its perceptive readings of Conrad's great novels and for its demonstration...

Mysticism in contemporary Islamic political thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush.(Essay)
March 22, 2006... "You know, I've had enough of big ideas." (2) Whether due to Western-style schemes of "development," Marxism, nationalism, secularism, or Islamism, the Islamic world has suffered its share of ideological activism. What these ideologies...

Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the role of tradition.(Essay)
March 22, 2006... Introduction Modernity has reached a dead end. The optimism in which the modern world was conceived and nurtured has been replaced by a thoroughgoing skepticism that denies the possibility of making meaningful truth claims, especially when...

The tears of Priam: reflections on Troy and teaching ancient texts.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... "Sing, goddess, the anger of the critic at the devastation wrought by the movie Troy, which put pains a thousandfold upon the bard Homer." Warner Brothers 2004 release of Troy, a $100 million feature film based on Homer's Iliad, was a valuable...

John of Salisbury, the Policraticus, and political thought.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Introduction Given his reputation as the most learned and literate man of his time, it is remarkable that John of Salisbury (ca.1120-1180) is not better known to the Western world. Granting the general "obscurity" of the Middle Ages, it...

Richard Rorty's postmodern case for liberal democracy: a critique.
March 22, 2006... 1. Introduction Liberal democracy was originally founded on the Enlightenment notion that there are principles, accessible to unassisted reason, demonstrating that political life should be dedicated to the protection of rights common to...

Locke the hermenaut and the mechanics of understanding.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... "Nothing that is said has its truth simply in itself, but refers instead backward and forward to what is unsaid." --H. G. Gadamer "The use of language is, by short sounds to signify with ease and dispatch general conceptions:...