Uncommon Law

by | Mar 30, 2014

The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Volume VII: India. The Hastings Trial 1789-1794, Edited by P. J. Marshall, Clarendon Press (Oxford), 2000 A Review This volume is the seventh to appear in the new Oxford edition of Burke’s works under the general editorship...

Edmund Burke: Christian Statesman

by | Mar 30, 2014

First, Edmund Burke was a Christian, despite the doubts that critics have expressed about his faith. But he was the child of a mixed marriage between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, a member of the Established Church of Ireland. Because Edmund was somewhat...

Mackinder, Geography, and History

by | Mar 30, 2014

Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) understood the forces that shape world politics better than any thinker of the twentieth century. When he delivered his famous address to the Royal Geographical Society in London in January 1904—an address that accurately foresaw the main...

Defining the Just Society

by | Mar 30, 2014

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972.What is justice? This question has perennially aroused the avid interest of man ever since he began pondering the riddles of the universe. Plato, who...

Reclaiming the Common Mind

by | Mar 23, 2014

The Common Mind: Politics, Society, and Christian Humanism, by André Gushurst-Moore. Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2013. 251 pages. $25. T. S. Eliot gives a statement by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus as an epigraph to Four Quartets: “Although the Logos is...

Repeating Calamities

by | Mar 16, 2014

A conversation with Simon Schama.Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. He has published fifteen history books and two novels, titles including The American Future: A History, The Embarrassment of Riches: An...

The Stories We Tell—The People We Become (Part 2)

by | Mar 12, 2014

Read Part One here. While both the Liberal Story and the Radical Story focus on equality as a good (however differently defined), the Conservative Story is about the danger of equality. Also unlike the two stories we’ve explored, which focus on abstract universals,...

The Stories We Tell—The People We Become

by | Mar 9, 2014

And it came to pass, when all the people had completely crossed over the Jordan, that the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying: “Take for yourselves twelve men from the people, one man from every tribe, and command them, saying, ‘Take for yourselves twelve stones from here,...

Small Towns Can Be Big Stages

by | Mar 2, 2014

Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future by Robert Wuthnow. Princeton University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 498 pages, $35. Small towns, as Robert Wuthnow points out in his ambitious new book, are not municipal subdivisions of large metropolitan areas....

Can America Find Order?

by | Mar 2, 2014

An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History, by Rowland Berthoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.A principal difficulty in writing significant social history is the necessity to harmonize certain diverse elements: the descriptive, or exposition...