I come to praise the dead, or perhaps, to recognize their importance at the least. Actually a little of both. Last week the intellectual world lost two more giants. Perhaps I am getting old, but this seems to be happening with greater frequency. Michael Novak and Kenneth Arrow both died. Novak (1933-2017) and Arrow (1921-2017) […]
Archives
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The Work of Two Intellectual Giants
26 Feb 2017
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As I’ve shared before, I am excited by some of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda, and his executive orders even this week on regulation are a great first step toward unleashing the American economy. When I consider our budget issues going forward, the best way to enable any other necessary change is for faster economic growth. […]
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On February 17, 2017 Michael Novak, champion of capitalism, died at the age of 83. Arguably Novak had a more significant impact than any other scholar of his generation who wrote on political economy from a distinctive Christian perspective. I picked up my copy of his 1982 classic: The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (still a best seller at Amazon). […]
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The Examined Life–With Some Help
17 Feb 2017
Why do people still read Plato? Aristotle? The Bible? Augustine? Thomas Aquinas? John Locke? Immanuel Kant (well, maybe not so much)? What unifies them? It isn’t religion. Plato and Aristotle were most certainly not Christians. Augustine and Aquinas would have disagreed on the extent of man’s capacity to know and to will the good. The […]
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My colleague of several decades, two universities and fellow Berean Marc Clauson penned a response to a post I made on February 8. In his response, Mark said that I had written a piece “… addressing more than one issue related to President Trump. The one that caught my attention was immigration policy.” I had […]
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Immigration: A Partial Response
14 Feb 2017
My colleague Bert Wheeler wrote a recent piece on Bereans addressing more than one issue related to President Trump. The one that caught my attention was immigration policy. Bert expressed his concern (rightly) about Trump’s policies on that front. I assume from his use of the word “concerns” meant that he might or did have […]
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Some News to Ponder: In No Particular Order
14 Feb 2017
The news keeps coming in and things keep boiling in and around Washington, DC, that bastion of all things good and decent. Let’s just list a few: General Flynn resigns, ostensibly for some security missteps. Another part of this story however is the revealed extreme politicization of the Intelligence agencies and the Justice Department. For […]
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An Exile in Trumplandia and The Road to Serfdom
08 Feb 2017
Illiberal. That one word, expresses my primary fear about President Donald J Trump. Yesterday I posted An Exile in Trumplandia Discovers Twitter which I hope partially illustrates our president’s response to some of the institutional pushback he is seeing. When I use the word “liberal”, I am not using the word to mean government control, as “liberal” has […]
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An Exile in Trumplandia Discovers Twitter
07 Feb 2017
I have been fairly adept avoiding social media so far. Over a decade ago I experimented with Facebook for a very short while, soon deciding that Facebook simply took up too much time. When we joined a house church in the early part of this decade I revived my Facebook account in order to read […]
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The Liberal Arts in the Christian Context
05 Feb 2017
Leland Ryken, Professor of English Emeritus at Wheaton College, has a fine track record of scholarship over a career that began in 1968. He has written thoughtfully about integration in his field, among other topics, but in particular I encourage you to focus on his well known essay entitled “The Student’s Calling.” In it he […]