Since the 1980s, the French left and right have formed a front républicain or cordon sanitaire to keep the Front national (FN) out of power. When Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine took over the party in 2011, she understood that the only road to electoral success . . . . Continue Reading »
In his famous speech (in Acts 17) to “men of Athens” at the Areopagus, St. Paul speaks of the providential ordering of God as including different nations, each having its particular boundaries. God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having . . . . Continue Reading »
The ongoing uproar after the election of Donald Trump led the sociologist James Davison Hunter to reflect in a fresh way on the engines driving political conflict and social division. Back in the early 1990s, he popularized the phrase “culture war,” the now-indispensable term to describe the . . . . Continue Reading »
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by steven pinker viking, 576 pages, $35 Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes . . . . Continue Reading »
Alienation and Freedom by frantz fanon edited by jean khalfa and robert j. c. young translated by steven corcoran bloomsbury academic, 816 pages, $29.95 In the ferment of the present moment, with its surging floods of migrants and its ostensibly gratuitous but historically . . . . Continue Reading »
On a clear June day in 2017, two million people lined the route of the New York Pride Parade to cheer as floats sponsored by Deutsche Telekom, Nissan, Facebook, and Toronto-Dominion Bank went by. Marchers wearing #Resistance T-shirts led the way, followed by ranks of New York’s Finest marching . . . . Continue Reading »