It is has become commonplace to regard Ivan Karamazov’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” as a prescient parable glorifying human freedom and defending it against the kind of totalitarian threats it would face in the twentieth century. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s angry atheist delivers an uncanny . . . . Continue Reading »
Modern institutions talk about themselves. When a corporation refashions itself—undergoes a complete makeover not merely to look different, but to play an entirely different role—this revolution is fundamentally a matter of talk. Such a transformation took place in the . . . . Continue Reading »
If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first tool of the discontented is the welcome lie. Such lies cluster freely around Thomas Aquinas. Here I want to engage two frequently encountered in feminist literature: that he claims women are defective males and that he claims that the . . . . Continue Reading »
This is the “hiring season” for those of us in academia, the time of year when faculty search committees sift through piles of applications for teaching jobs for the coming academic year, and when PhD candidates like me wait nervously for the telephone to ring with invitations for job . . . . Continue Reading »
Moral philosophers are caught in a peculiar paradox these days. On the one hand, their field is flourishing: No longer intimidated by the logical positivists (who denied truth to moral assertions except as expressions of likes and dislikes), thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Jean-Paul Sartre is not, to put it mildly, very high on the reading list of those seeking to grow in Christian piety. Indeed, most would express mild shock at the suggestion that his writings could ever make such a list. His atheism would unsettle the tremulous soul, his contradictions would both . . . . Continue Reading »
Reasoned Faithedited by Eleanor Stumpecho point books & media, $34.95A decade ago, the well-respected Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga urged Christian thinkers to philosophize not only for skeptics but for their own faith communities. Christian philosophers, he argued, should do Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
I Nietzsche claimed that if men took God seriously, they would still be burning heretics at the stake. In the same spirit, one supposes, are the notions that if men really cherished moral truth, they would suppress all beliefs that they considered wrong, and that if men still cared about the . . . . Continue Reading »
To grow up in Canada is to inherit a privileged position for understanding modernity—sufficiently distant from that hurtling spaceship of “the republic to our south,” while retaining (perhaps from connections to nature, to the history of France, and to Catholicism) a sharp, intuitive sense . . . . Continue Reading »
A few years ago I appeared on “Firing Line” with my Notre Dame colleagues Gerhardt Niemeyer and Ralph McInerny for a discussion of natural law. My memory of that occasion is vivid: our attempt to discuss the possibilities for the theory of natural law in the contemporary intellectual climate was . . . . Continue Reading »
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