James Poulos

Over at Secular Right , David Hume has words for our PAL: Though the author of Atheist Delusions is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, Lawler reports that his criticism of the New Atheists starts from a Nietzschian perspective. All I have to say is that homey don’t play that game. . . . . Continue Reading »

The collapse of sacred order in Europe during the World Wars left many of Europe’s surviving Jewish intellectuals to stake their theory and practice on the future of the United States and Israel. Communism, of course, opened its arms to secular Jews from the outset, but fascism tormented the . . . . Continue Reading »

How long before someone makes the argument that the government has to deal drugs in order to afford the medicine Americans need ? The libertarian rejoinder that we can and should decriminalize pot without nationalizing health care shows more intellectual promise than popular support. And too many . . . . Continue Reading »

George Will on Michele Bachmann: Looking toward 2012, she is not drawn merely to Sarah Palin or other darlings of social conservatives. She certainly is one of those, but she knows that economic hardship and government elephantiasis now trump other issues. Indeed, but what’s really of . . . . Continue Reading »

Our Ivan Kenneally unloads on Obamacare in The Weekly Standard: If one were to take seriously the central premise of Obama’s ersatz science of politics—the distinction between political facts and moral values—the inescapable conclusion is that our president turns out to be a . . . . Continue Reading »

I hoped I could prove this with a link, but back during the presidential primary race, I told at least one person that, when it came to the health care debate, not universality but comprehensiveness was the issue. You can imagine that a pomocon has an ingrained or inherent dislike for . . . . Continue Reading »

Somewhat delayed post, but the topic, I think, is plenty fresh. On the Brooks view of individuality (which I discussed on below), Maggie Gallagher at the Corner says: Having psychologized every other aspect of morality, there is no good reason why we shouldn’t also psychologize the idea of . . . . Continue Reading »

From the very outset, the term ‘culture wars’ was misleading. Not that it wasn’t apropos — for, indeed, as all could see, there were different cultures contending over not just authority but power in America, many cultures in one manner but, in another, at rock bottom, only . . . . Continue Reading »

David Brooks tells us that Where The Wild Things Are accurately shows that, for us, the “philosopher’s” way of thinking about the good life is out and the “psychologist’s” way is in. The wild things, just as the tagline tells us, are inside us all, just one of . . . . Continue Reading »

Cruelty, the famous theorist Judith Shklar tells us, is the worst thing we do. For small-l and big-L liberals as different as Richard Rorty and George Kateb, cruelty is borne of moral solipsism, an overly me-centric attitude toward experience that blinds us to the truth about the reality of other . . . . Continue Reading »