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Religious Music & Entertainment

2019-09-28T14:33:12-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Lovecraft and the Metacrisis of Liberalism

Last updated on: September 28, 2019 at 2:33 pm By John Ehrett

One of the more significant influences on pop culture over the last decade or so has been H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), a once-obscure writer of pulp fiction who’s lately enjoyed something of a revival. And I tend to think the reasons for his increased prominence have a good deal to do with the contemporary philosophical-theological zeitgeist. Lovecraft is best known for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, an interconnected series of short stories blending science fiction, horror, and social commentary. The most famous... Read more

Culture

2019-09-20T17:47:41-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Ahmari-French Debate: Still Missing the Point

Last updated on: September 20, 2019 at 5:47 pm By John Ehrett

Last week, in the wake of the tweetstorms that launched a thousand thinkpieces, social-conservative interlocutors David French and Sohrab Ahmari squared off at Notre Dame—the second of two live conversations. The “debate”—or, more accurately, the discussion—was an extension of their ongoing argument over the future of the American cultural right. To distill the argument down to its essence: against French’s embrace of constitutionalism, limited government, and liberal-democratic proceduralism. Ahmari advocates a more “muscular” conservative politics unafraid to advance a substantive... Read more

Political Theory

2019-08-31T21:19:19-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

That Mysterious Thing, the “Liberal State”: A Response to Andrew Willard Jones, Marc Barnes, and Jacob Fareed Imam

Last updated on: August 31, 2019 at 9:19 pm By John Ehrett

Though I don’t know if I’ve used the term before, a frequent subject of this column is Christian postliberalism—in the simplest terms, theological and philosophical efforts by Christians to challenge the premises of the current sociopolitical order. According to its critics, that current order—often labeled “liberalism”—prioritizes individual equality and autonomy, generally rejects the legitimacy of arguments that directly appeal to tradition as a justification, and broadly seeks to eradicate barriers to individuals’ full self-actualization. Postliberalism, then, is an attempt to... Read more

Political Theory

2019-06-23T13:35:54-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Confronting “The Limits of Liberalism”

Last updated on: June 23, 2019 at 1:35 pm By John Ehrett

In recent months, much of the intellectual energy among conservative thinkers has been oriented toward a reexamination of first principles—whether, for instance, the American social order was always destined to abandon tradition and collapse into a tribalistic struggle for power. As I’ve written about here and elsewhere, that reexamination has played out across multiple online publications and in the pages of numerous recent books. Mark T. Mitchell’s new volume, The Limits of Liberalism, is a fruitful extension of that conversation.... Read more

Political Theory

2019-06-23T11:57:21-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

How (Not) to Write About Natural Law

Last updated on: June 23, 2019 at 11:57 am By John Ehrett

Every so often, one runs across an argument that is so spectacularly flawed it cannot even be described as “bad”—one that suffers from a category error so profoundly flawed, it’s tantamount to walking into an Apple store and complaining that they don’t have any Fujis or Granny Smiths. Kathryn Joyce’s recent diatribe against natural law thinking (and against Princeton professor Robert George, its prominent exponent) in the pages of The New Republic is one such argument. In a nutshell, the piece... Read more

Culture

2019-06-02T16:27:28-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Death of Liberal Democracy: A Few Notes on the Ahmari-French Controversy

Last updated on: June 2, 2019 at 4:27 pm By John Ehrett

Last week, one of the more long-simmering disputes in contemporary conservative thought flared up pretty dramatically. Sohrab Ahmari—erstwhile Wall Street Journal contributor, current New York Post writer, and prominent conservative Catholic—fired off a sharp polemic in the pages of First Things against a certain strain of conservatism epitomized by National Review writer David French. (French issued a rejoinder shortly thereafter.) I don’t want to paint over too many nuances, but much of the online chatter surrounding this dust-up has framed the debate as... Read more

Political Theory

2019-04-09T20:47:51-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Some Thoughts on Yale Law, Nondiscrimination, and Religious Freedom

Last updated on: April 9, 2019 at 8:47 pm By John Ehrett

I’ve hesitated to write anything about the storm currently brewing at my alma mater, mainly because the phenomenon of “conservative writers bashing the schools they attended” is practically a cliché. But as I’ve pondered the story a little longer, the more I think it raises some profoundly important questions about what educational institutions are really for. A few weeks ago, the Yale chapter of the Federalist Society hosted Kristen Waggoner, an attorney from the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom... Read more

Uncategorized

2019-12-28T21:05:08-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Does the Evolution of “Human Rights” Drive Modern Abortion Politics?

Last updated on: December 28, 2019 at 9:05 pm By John Ehrett

As I’ve written about before, many conservative thinkers are not fond of expansive arguments from “human rights.” For one thing, the ongoing proliferation of the claims that count as appeals to “human rights” undermines the principle that human rights are grounded in (created) human nature: how, after all, can a “right to high-speed internet” possibly be deemed a “universal right”? (Was everyone prior to 2005 simply suffering in benighted oppression?) Some press the argument further: a few of today’s sharper conservative... Read more

Political Theory

2019-01-02T19:25:33-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Pantheism Ascendant?

Last updated on: January 2, 2019 at 7:25 pm By John Ehrett

A few weeks ago, I found myself reading a recent essay by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat—and it’s a good one. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the most interesting pieces he’s penned in quite some time. Here, he argues a position that (as he acknowledges) goes well beyond the theories advanced in his own book Bad Religion: How We Became A Nation of Heretics. In Douthat’s updated telling, the American socio-religious zeitgeist is evolving (or, to be... Read more

Culture

2018-12-22T14:38:04-05:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Catechesis and Complicity

Last updated on: December 22, 2018 at 2:38 pm By John Ehrett

Last week, Samuel Moyn—a professor of law and history at my alma mater—published a provocative article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Contra the widespread assumption that leading universities are incubators of progressive political ideas, Moyn argues that elite law schools are profoundly amoral, philosophically denuded environments. To support his claim, Moyn points to schools’ reverence for judges qua judges, wholly irrespective of those judges’ actual decision-making histories; schools’ uneasy juxtaposition of activist “clinical education” training programs alongside institutional funneling... Read more

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